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CAUSES THAT 



WAR BETWEEN THE STAT 





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CAUSES THAT LED 
TO THE 

War Between the States 

BY 

J. O. McGEHEE 

Fifty-third Virginia PsCgiment 
Armistead's Brigade 

Picket's Division 

Longstreet's Corps 

Army Northern Virginia 



1915 

A. B. CALDWELL PUBLISHING CO., 

ATLANTA, GA. 






copy RIOHT 

B CAUDWELL 

leiB - 




NOV 26*915 

PCI.A4Mi7;).'} 



DEDICATION 



To the United Daughters of the Confederacy, 
whose older members can testify out of their own 
faithful and loving memories and heroic experi- 
ences, to the real facts of history herein contained, 
this little book is affectionately dedicated in the 
hope and belief that the Truth, pure and undefiled, 
will be, by them, forever preserved and handed 
down, unshorn and unperverted, to all the gener- 
ations of our sons and daughters yet unborn. 

The Author. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 
Root of Causes that Led to War 



CHAPTER II 
Union Saved From Early Dissolution by Conservative Men 
of All Sections 25 

CHAPTER III 

ERRATA AND ADDENDA. 

For "Good Speed" in 16th line from top of page 11 read 
God Speed. 

For "South" in 11th line from bottom of page 45 read 
North. 
The Chicago Convention, Lincoln's Nomination, Bitterness 
of Campaign 49 

CHAPTER VI 
Lincoln's Election 57 

CHAPTER VII 
Virginia Legislature and Effort at Peace 69 

CHAPTER VIII 
The Virginia Convention and What Followed 75 

CHAPTER IX 
Lincoln's Call for Troops, etc 95 

CHAPTER X 
Conclusion 101 




J. (). McGEHEE 
Sept. 1915 



CHAPTER I. 



This paper, or series of papers, originated in a 
request, seconded by an ardent desire on the part 
of the writer, to place in the hands of the Daugh- 
ters of the Confederacy in succinct and convenient 
form the imperishable truths and incontrovertible 
facts pertaining to the spirit and origin of the 
causes that led to the war between the States; 
thus enabling them more fully to grasp and dis- 
seminate those truths among their own member- 
ship and hand them down unalloyed and unper- 
verted to future generations of our sons and 
daughters. 

The task, once undertaken, was found to be 
so wide in scope and so comprehensive in char- 
acter, both as to time and events, that it was im- 
practicable to handle it properly and satisfactorily 
within the prescribed limits of a single paper and, 
hence, the treatise has, perforce, grown and 
amplified into its present form and dimensions. 
No sadder and more humiliating spectacle pre- 
sents itself to the men and women of ''The Sixties" 
than to see and hear their children or children's 
children deprecating or apologizing for the heroic 
course of action followed by their parents and 
grandparents during the trying and eventful years 
of those glorious but terrible times. 

Our whole country, indeed the English speak- 
ing world, during the half century that has 
elapsed since the close of that great struggle, has 
been flooded with so-called Histories of what they 



10 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

choose to term "The Civil War." Most of those 
books, especially of those which emanated from 
the North in the years immediately subsequent 
to the war, and before Southern writers be^an to 
revive and breathe freely after the bloody and 
crushing defeat and overthrow of the great cause 
for which they fought, were written from a bit- 
terly partizan standpoint. During the horrible 
nightmare of "Reconstruction" many of those 
books invaded or crept into our public and private 
schools, breathing into the ears of our sons and 
daughters the insidious i^oison of the fanatical 
hate and murderous passions that prepared the 
way and finally precipitated the awful strife that 
deluged the country with blood, teaching, or seek- 
ing to teach, them to regard their fathers and 
mothers as rebels and traitors. Now that sucli 
perfidious agents and such pernicious teaching 
have been happily expelled from our schools and 
eliminated from our educational system, it is 
vitally necessary that our boys and girls should 
be calmly and dispassionately instructed as to the 
real and true causes that led up to and forced an 
unjust and cruel war ui)on the South, and with 
that end in view this short and very incomplete 
paper has been prepared with the hope that it 
may inspire and lead others to give a more full 
and exhaustive ti'catnu'nt to a sul)ject that is here- 
in but barely bi'oachcd. What, then, were the true 
causes that lt:d up to ami (inally precipitated that 
momentous and ruinous struggle; who were the 
real authors of it, and wliat were its objects and 
purposes? 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 11 

To seek the source and understand the animus 
of those causes will carry us back to the very be- 
ginning of our country's history. Indeed, to reach 
the root of the incipient enmity and jealousy and 
final estrangement that culminated in the rending 
asunder of the sections we must cross the Atlantic 
and study the widely dissimilar character and 
sentiment, religious, political and social, of the 
separate and distinct classes of people, who, in 
emigrating to America, divided themselves be- 
tween the New England and the Southern States. 
The germs of discord and dissolution sported in 
the antagonistic blood that warmed the hostile 
veins of Roundhead and Cavalier and lurked 
among the timbers of the "May Flower" and the 
"Good Speed." r.-^-V - &oc/ S^^^t 

New England was a community founded to be 
the home of a creed with its discipline, and for a 
century after the landing of the Pilgrims, re- 
mained a frontier settlement closed in and hedged 
about by primeval forests infested by roving 
bands of prowling savages. Having no contact, 
therefore, no intercourse with the other colonies 
and actuated by a single standard of conduct, she 
became "one community from end to end and her 
people one people,"' standing apart and com- 
pact, soberly cultivating a life and character all 
her own. Col. William Byrd, of Westover, in his 
quaint descriptive writing says of her : "Though 
these people may be ridiculed for some of the 
Pharisaical particularities of their worship and 

iGeorge Washington, Woodrow Wilson, page 12. 



12 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

behavior, yet they are very useful subjects as be- 
ing frugal and industrious, giving no scandal or 
bad example. "- 

The great body of the people who emigrated to 
Virginia in the first seventy years of the colony's 
existence "had left Englancl as much because they 
hated the Puritans as because they desired Vir- 
ginia. They were drawn out of that great ma- 
jority at home to whom Cromwell had not dared 
resort to get a new Parliament in place of the one 
he had 'purged', and many of them were of the 
hottest blood of the Cavaliers.'" From such a 
source Virginia got her character and received 
the blood from which was to spring her future 
race of gentlemen and statesmen, eminent church- 
men, profound lawyers, polemic orators and dash- 
ing soldiers of valor unsurpassed in any age or 
country. The tidewater counties of the Old Do- 
minion thus peopled were backed and buttressed 
by that life — and character-giving tide of sturdy 
and matchless Scotch-Irish yeomanry which 
spread itself along the Eastern slope of the Ap- 
palachian range of V^irginia and North Carolina 
and surged over into the fertile and teeming val- 
leys beyond the Blue Ridg<\ Alexander Spots- 
wood, who had seen service under Marlborough 
and with "our army in Flanders;" had tra\('led 
much through the then i\nown world on embassies 
and other impoi'iant errands, having dealings 
with all manner of peoples, at last finding him- 
self in Virginia, where he was sent by the home 

'George WashinKton, VVoodrow Wilson, page 13. 
-History of the Dividing Line, VVni. Bynl, page A. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 13 

government as Colonial Governor of the Old Do- 
minion, said of these people that he found among 
them "less swearing, less profaneness, less drunk- 
enness and debauchery, less uncharitable feuds 
and animosity, and less knavery and villainy than 
in any part of the world" he had ever been.- 

None will pretend that all who came to Vir- 
jrinia to seek their fortune or better their con- 
dition in this land of promise were gentlemen in 
the Enirlish accontation of the term, and few 
could afford to send their sons to England to be 
educated, but "there were, at least, the traditions 
of culture in the colony and enough men of educa- 
tion and refinement to leaven the mass ;" strong, 
thinking, highbred men who showed a mastery and 
leadership in all that tends to make a people good 
and great were found on all the great plantations 
that lined the rivers and streams and inlets of 
tidewater; and as Virginia rose from the condi- 
tion of a mere colony to that of a sturdy common- 
v/ealth she "could boast her own breed of gentle- 
man, merchants, scholars and statesmen." 

The widely differing political views and opin- 
ions held by the leading men of the North and 
South began to show their legitimate fruits in 
feelings and arts of enmity, hostility and 
estrangement alm.ost immediately after the for- 
mation of thf^ Union. This difference may be best 
understood by reviewing the political sentiments 
and doctrines entertained by Alexander Hamilton 
nnd Thomas Jefforsfm, the idols, respectively, of 
the New England or Monarchical party, and of 
the Southern, or Democratic, party. 

ZQfficial Letters of Alexander Spotswood, page 28. 



14 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

Hamilton was a monarchist pure and simple, 
desiring and laboring to establish in this country 
a government th;it should be in everything, ex- 
cept its name, a tcingdom instead of a republic. 

Luther Martin said of Hamilton and his fol- 
lowers: "It was a party whose object and wish 
was to abolish and annihilate all the State Gov- 
ernments and bring forward one general govern- 
ment over all this extended continent of a Mon- 
archical nature." 

Throughout the writings of Jefferson we find 
frequent allusions to and consideration of the 
Monarchical views held and disseminated by 
Hamilton. He and Hamilton were in Washing- 
ton's Cabinet together, and thirty years after- 
wards, while calmly reviewing the many stirring 
and often exciting incidents of debate and clash- 
ing of opinions and principles around the Council 
Table, he tells us: "Hamilton was not only a 
Monarchist, but for a Monarchy bottomed on cor- 
ruption." And Hamilton, himself, declared: "I 
have no objection to a trial of this thing called a 
republic, but for my part I avow myself a Mon- 
archist." And in August. 170L three years after 
the adoption of the Constitution under which we 
are now living. Hamilton, in conversation with 
Mr. Jefferson, declared: "I own it is my opinion 
that the present Government is not that which 
will answer, and that it will be found expedient 
to go into the British form." In other and plainer 
words, to become a Monarchy. 

Washington, who had previously been in sym- 
pathy and affiliation with the Federalist party, 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 15 

as the followers of Hamilton were called, shared 
the alarm of his Cabinet and the friends of his 
Administration caused by such treasonable senti- 
ments and utterances of his Secretary of the 
Treasury, and. in July. 1792. wrote to Hamilton 
asking for an explanation of those rumors with 
which the countrv was fillod. Wnshinsfton, like 
Jefferson, was a Virsrinian, and had no sympathy 
with the Monarchical principles of Hamilton and 
his followers, as is plainly shown when he says, 
after his correspondence with his Secretary. 
"Those who lean to a Monar^'hir'al Government 
have either not consulted the public mind, or they 
live in a roffion which is more productive of Mon- 
at-chical ideas than is the case in the Southern 
States." Thus, it is seen that as early as 1790 
there existed jrreat difference and antagonism be- 
tween the Statesmen of the North and South on 
the subject of jrovernment: and if we po back 
still farther we find those same parties and prin- 
eiples pitted ajrainst each other in the Conven- 
tion that formed the Constitution. There we see 
tho Jpffersonian and Hamil^onian parties sharply 
and clearly aligned aganist each other; the one 
in fnvor of a jrovernment bv the people with 
powers cautiously limited and clearly defined in 
the Constitution : the other in favor of what they 
called, and v/hat their successors, the Republican 
party of todav. still call "a strone- Government" 
with all the arbitran'^ powers of a Monarchy with- 
out its name. "The Jefferson I'an idea was that 
■^V(p people are the masters of the Government. 
The Hamiltonian idea was that the Government is 



16 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

the Master of the people." The struggle between 
the friends and supporters of these opposing and 
conflicting ideas was earnest and obstinate, caus- 
ing long and sometimes bitter debates which called 
out all the fiery eloquence for which the Consti- 
tutional Convention was noted. In the end the 
Jeffersonian Party prevailed and gave to the 
country a Democratic Constitution. 

Hamilton expressed his bitter disappointment 
in a letter to Morris in 1802 in which he said: 
"No man has done more to uphold the present 
Constitution than myself, and I am still laboring 
to prop the frail and worthless fabric ; yet, I have 
nothing but the murmurs of its friends and the 
curses of its foes for my reward. Every day 
proves to me more and more that this American 
world was not made for me. and what better can 
I do than withdraw from the scene." If he had 
withdrawn before he inculcated his baleful doc- 
trines and formed his party of de.struction. history 
would not have had to record three-(iuarters of a 
century later the sad spectacle of a country torn 
asunder by fratricidal strife, and that section of it 
which always plead for peace deluged with blood 
and ovcrwhi^lmed with desolation. 

'i'he Hamilton ian or Federalist Party embraced, 
as the Republican Party of today has always done, 
a vast majority of the men of wealth and high 
social position in the North. General Washing- 
ton served the country eight years as President, 
and his over-shadowing popularity with his well- 
known and undoubted Southern sentiments over- 
ruled and held down everything like the ambition 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 17 

of cliques and sectional bitterness. But as soon 
as his presidency was at an end, and his succes- 
sor had to be chosen the Federalists, the sworn 
enemies of Democratic principles of government 
and Jeffersonian simplicity of public administra- 
tion, again showed the cloven foot of their Mon- 
archical, or "strong government" ideas, and near- 
ly every safeguard which the Constitution throws 
around the liberties of the people was threatened 
or overthrown. Then it was that the slumbering 
anta.gonism between the political principles of the 
leading statesmen of the North and South began 
to assume a v^'ell"defined shape in the division of 
parties. 

John Adams, of Massachusetts was an original 
Domocrat, and his great and valuable services to 
the country during the Revolution are well-known 
and acknowledged. President Washington had 
sent him as Minister to England, and his residence 
there had completely dazzled and fascinated him 
with the pomp and glare and glitter of Royalty 
and Nobility, and he conceived those attributes of 
Monarchy to be a necessary ingredient of Gov- 
ernment. He was taken up and flattered and 
cajoled by the Federalists in his absence and, on 
his return to the United States, was made their 
candidate for President; just as, in our own day. 
General Grant, who had been a lifelong Democrat 
and a slaveholder, was seduced to follow the loaves 
and fishes of Federal patrona5re and, deserting his 
real political principles, bowed down to the god 
of pomp and power and emolument, whose shrine 
is public office. 



18 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

Under the Adams Administration the most 
foolish and oppressive laws were enacted by the 
Federalist majority in Cong-ress. Among those 
acts were the famous, or rather infamous "Alien 
and Sedition Laws" which gave the President 
power to banish all aliens from the United States, 
or lock them up in prison during his pleasure, an^^ 
to cause the arrest and imprisonment of any per- 
son who should dare to write or speak anything 
against the President or Congress, thus putting 
in the President's hands as arbitrary and despotic 
power as was ever wielded by the "Czar of all the 
Russias." 

Under the exercise of such shameful and des- 
potic authority, which jeopardized the liberty of 
every citizen of the United States, the Honorable 
Matthew Lyon, a Democrat and public-spirited 
citizen, for daring to criticize "the ridiculous and 
idle parade" of the President, was seized and 
thrust into a cold dungeon six feet square to starve 
and freeze during one whole winter, and was 
liberated only on the payment of a fiine of one 
thousand dollars. As another specimen of the 
exercise of this kingly pr)wer which ran riot in 
cruelty and mob violence. General Sumter, an atred 
veteran and one of the most distinguished patriots 
of the country, was knocked down and brutally 
beaten by an officer of the Admijiistration at a 
theater in Philadelphia because he netrlected to 
fakr off his hat when it was announced that the 
President was coming in.' As expressive of the 
monarchical spirit of the Party in power, an ad- 

iWritings of John Wood, historian of tlic times. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 19 

dress to the President dated May 1st, 1798, de- 
clared : "We, the subscribers, inhabitants and 
citizens of Boston, beg leave to express to you, the 
Chief Magistrate and Supreme Ruler of the United 
States, our fullest approbation of all the measures 
you have been pleased to adopt under direction of 
Divine Aufhorifi/.'' Surely that was the doctrine 
of the Divine Right of Kings unadulterated! 

The defeat and overthrow of the despotic and 
unconstitutional regime of the Federalist Party 
was accomplished by the wisdom and patriotism 
of the United South under the leadership of Jef- 
ferson and Madison. Those pure patriots and 
incorruptible statesmen drew up the famous "Vir- 
ginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798," which 
were adopted by the Legislatures of Virginia and 
Kentucky and accepted by the entire South with 
the same unanimity with which they were con- 
demned and rejected by the North. 

These Resolutions "pointedly condemn all the 
despotic and revolutionary acts of the Adams Ad- 
ministration as subversive of the free Govern- 
ment of the United States, and clearly set forth 
all the powers of the Federal Government as re- 
sulting from a compact or agreement between 
sovereign and independent States, each State pos- 
sessing 'an equal right to decide for itself as well 
of infractions as of the mode and manner of re- 
dress.' " 

The Federalists, thus attacked in their strong- 
hold, raised a wild cry of alarm and desperation, 
but the friends of Democracy everywhere. North 
as well as South, adopted the resolutions as their 



20 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

written creed of political faith, and on that plat- 
form Jefferson was elected President and the Fed- 
eralists were hurled from power. The wildest 
excesses of violent language and actions marked 
the downfall of the defeated Federalists. Jeffer- 
son was denounced as "an infidel," "a Jacobin," "a 
traitor" and "a scoundrel." These vile epithets 
were hurled at the head of the author of the 
Declaration of Independence from pulpits, ros- 
trums and letrislative halls all over the North, and 
from the Editorial rooms of every Federalist 
newspaper in the country. 

The hatred of Jefferson and all the leading 
statesmen of the South did not die with that gen- 
eration, but parents taught their children to hate, 
not only the leaders, but the whole Southern peo- 
ple, thus sowing the seeds of that "irrepressible 
conflict" which should, in the coming years, either 
df\siroy the Union, which they hated, or crush the 
Soiiih under a deluge of murder and rapine. 

Thus defeated in their purpose to lead or drive 
the people into a form of government administered 
on Monarchical n)'inciples, and igiiominioiisly 
driven from powt^r by the election of JefTer.son, 
the Federalist leaders set to work with renewed 
dofevmination and envenomed hate to excite the 
resentment and infhime the passions of their fol- 
lowers to such a pitch of fanaticism as would 
enable them to disrupt the Union and destroy the 
Constitution, both of whu-h they had always hafed 
and reviled. Abundant histr)rical and irrefutable 
proof of this fact could bo compiled from many 
sources, but the limits of this paper will not ad- 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 21 

mit such voluminous records. In a letter dated 
in 1796 Mr. Jefferson says: "The Alien and 
Sedition Laws are working hard. For my own 
part I consider the laws merely as an experiment 
on the American mind to see how far it will bear 
an avowed violation of the Constitution. If this 
goes down we shall immediately see another act 
of Congress declaring that the President shall 
continue in office during life, reserving to another 
occasion the transfer of the succession to his heirs 
and the establishment of a Senate for life." In a 
letter to Samuel Ringgold, written from Ports- 
mouth, New Hampshire, in 1800, John Langdon 
says: "In a conversation between Mr. Adams, 
Mr. Taylor and myself, Mr. Adams certainly ex- 
pressed a hope or expectation that his friend, 
Giles, would see the day when he would be con- 
vinced that the people of America would not be 
happy without an hereditary Chief Magistrate 
and Senate, or, at least, for life." In another 
letter Jefferson says : "A weighty minority of 
the Federalist leaders, considering a voluntary 
conversion into a Monarchy as too distant, if not 
too desperate, wish to break off from our Union 
its eastern fragment, as being in fact the hotbed 
of American Monarchism, with a view to the com- 
mencement of their favorite government, from 
which other States may gangrene by degrees and 
the whole, thus by degrees be brought to the de- 
sired point." 

Matthew Cary, an eminent author in his day, 
compiles a volume of facts in his great work, "The 
Olive Branch," showing a conspiracy in New Eng- 



22 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

land to break up the Union as early as 1796. The 
following extract is a sample of the well attested 
facts he there records: 

"A Northern Confederacy has been their object 
for a number of yeai\s. They have repeatedly ad- 
vocated in the public prints a separation of the 
States on account of pretended discordant views 
and interests of the different sections. This 
project of separation was formed shortly after the 
adoption of the Federal Constitution, Whether it 
was ventured before the pul)lic earlier than 179G 
I know not, but of its promulgation that year 
there is most indubitable evidence. To sow dis- 
cord, jealousy and hostility between different sec- 
tions of the Union was the first grand step in 
their career in order to accomplish the favorite 
object of a separation of the States. For eighteen 
years, therefore, from 1796 to 1814, the most un- 
ceasing endeavors have been used to poison the 
minds of the people of the Eastern States towards, 
and to alienate them from their fellow citizens of 
the Southern States. Nothing can exceed the 
violence of these caricatures, some of which 
would have suited the ferocious inhabitants of 
New Zealand rather than a civilized and polished 
nation.'" 

In that same year of 1796 there were published 
in Hartford, Connecticut, a series of papers over 
the signature of 'Telham" which, Cary tells us. 
"were the joint production of men of the finest 
talent in New Itlngland." This extract from the 
first number of those papers will amply show that 

'The <)liv<- liraiu'li, Miiltlicw (aiy, l.ilirary o( (."oiigrcss. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 23 

they were launched for the sole and undisguised 
purpose of destroying the Union, of which unpar- 
donable sin the South was afterwards, and is still, 
so bitterly accused and reviled, by the children 
and descendants of those same people: 

"The Northern States can exist as a nation 
without any connection with the Southern. It 
cannot be contested that if the Southern States 
were possessed of the same political ideas, our 
Union would be more close, but when it becomes 
a serious question whether we must give up our 
government or part with the States south of the 
Potomac no man north of that river whose heart 
is not thoroughly Democratic can hesitate what 
decision to make." And this was written in 1796. 

It shows the fealty of the South to Democratic 
principles of government, and her love and vener- 
ation for the Constitution was the cause of all 
the cunning hatred and abuse heaped upon her 
by the Federalist Monarchy loving leaders of New 
England. They deliberately plotted and planned 
to overthrow and destroy the Union, which had 
been established by the adoption of the Constitu- 
tion only eight years before, because the South 
was so thoroughly Democratic. 

Thus was inaugurated at that early day an un- 
relenting political and social war upon the South 
by the Federalists of the New England States 
which raged with increasing estrangement and 
hatred until the threatening war cloud burst at 
last upon the country in a deluge of blood. 




THE PERRY Pictures. i i 6. 

BOSTON EDITION. 



COPYRIGHT, '909, BY EUGENE A. PERRY 



THOMAS J E F F E R S .N 



CHAPTER II. 



During the troubled period of nearly seventy- 
years, from 1796 to 1860, while the muttering 
thunders of discord and dissolution were gather- 
ing increasing force and intensity, if all the vile 
abuse and vituperation of the South which was 
published in Northern papers and books were 
gathered into one stupendous work it would form 
an encyclopedia of a hundred folio volumes. 

But the complete triumph and ascendancy of 
the Democratic Party over that pernicious South 
hating, Union reviling faction saved the country 
from open rupture for the long period of over 
sixty years. 

The political, moral and social peace of the 
country was broken and destroyed by the old Fed- 
eralist Party nearly three quarters of a century 
before the Union was finally torn asunder as an 
inevitable result of their traitorous teachings and 
perpetual wrangling. But there existed through- 
out the Northern States, both in and out of New 
England, a weighty minority of patriotic men 
whose true Democratic principles could not be 
shaken or swerved or seduced from their loyalty 
and devotion to the Government established by 
the wisdom of the fathers and cemented by the 
blood of the Revolution and they, standing 
squarely with the solid South under the leader- 
ship of such men as Jefferson and Madison and 
Monroe and Mason and a host of others tried and 
true, both north and south of the Potomac, made 
it possible to protect, defend and preserve the 



20 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

integrity ol the Uniuii and tlic Cunstitutiun until 
the lateful year of 1860. 

In 1809 a conspiracy was discovered, between 
the agents of the British Government in Canada 
and the leading Federalists of New England, to 
disrupt the Union and establish a Northern Con- 
federacy in political alliance with the Government 
of England. Mr. Madison was then President and, 
in a message to Congress, he said: "I lay before 
Congress copies of certain documents which re- 
main in the Department of State. They prove 
that, at a recent period, on the part of the British 
CJovernment, through its public ministry here, a 
secret agent of that Government was employed 
in certain States, more especially at the seat of 
(Jovernment in the State of Massachusetts, in 
fomenting disaffection to the constituted authori- 
ties of the country ; and intrigued with the dis- 
affected for the purpose of bringing about resist- 
ance to the laws ; and eventually, in concert with 
a British force, of destroying the Union, and 
forming the eastern part thereof into a political 
connection with Great Britain.'" 

This astonishing message to Congress created a 
great flutter and wild consternation among the 
New England Federalists and traitors to the Un- 
ion. It established, by unmistakable and indis- 
putable proofs, that they had guiltily and traitor- 
ously conspired with a foreign power to disrupt 
and overthrow the Union because they had failed 
to subvert the Democratic form of Government 
established by the people. The British conspira- 

'MfSbUKts of the rrc'suiciits. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 27 

tor who was sent to inaugurate and conduct this 
shameful conspiracy to overthrow and destroy the 
Government established by the Fathers of the 
country wrote back to those who employed him 
that he found the leaders of New England ripe 
and ready for anything which could be made to 
sever the Union, but that love for the Union was 
so strong among the masses of the people who 
had fought and suffered to establish it that he 
doubted if it could be dissolved at the time and in 
the manner in which it has been undertaken ; and 
suggested that the only feasible way in which 
disunion could be successfully accomplished would 
be to start some sectional question or dispute by 
which the prejudices and passions of the people 
could be excited and embroiled to the point of 
physical strife and, thus, accomplish the object of 
dissolution. 

In the war of 1812 between the United States 
and England the Federalists of New England sym- 
pathized with England as far as they could pos- 
sibly go without actually taking up arms against 
the United States. John Quincy Adams, a Mas- 
sachusetts man of the straightest sect, but one 
who is given credit for the honesty of his utter- 
ances, is forced to declare that: "In the Eastern 
States curses and anathemas were liberally hurled 
from the Pulpits on the heads of all those who 
sided, directly or indirectly, in carrying on the 
war." Caleb Strong was then Governor of Mas- 
sachusetts. The following resolution was intro- 
duced in the Legislature of that State: "And, 
therefore, be it resolved that we recommend to 



28 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

his Excellency, Caleb Strong, to take the revenue 
of the State into his own hands, arm and equip 
the militia and declare us independent of the 
Union." 

At the same time Fisher Ames, one of the most 
distinguished leaders of political thought in New 
England, said: "Our country is too big for Un- 
ion, too sordid for patriotism, too Democratic for 
liberty. Our disease is Democracy ; it is not the 
skin, only, that festers, our very bones are cari- 
ous, and their marrow blackens with gangrene." 

The Rev, Dr. Dwight, a grandson of Jonathan 
Edwards, President of Yale University and ac- 
counted one of the ablest theologians of New 
England, said: "The Declaration of Independence 
is a wicked thing. I thought so when it was pro- 
claimed, and I think so still." 

One of the leading papers of Boston declared as 
the sentiment of the Party: "We never fought 
for a republic. The form of our Government was 
the result of necessity, not the offspring of 
choice." 

The Boston Gazette threatened President Mad- 
ison with death if he attempted to compel the 
Eastern States to fight against^ England at that 
time. 

And yet, in after years, those same people, or 
their descendants, raised a howl of Pharisaical in- 
dignation and hurled an avalanche of abuse at Vir- 
ginia because when their idol, Lincoln, required 
her to "level her guns on her Southern sisters," 
she refused and exercised her reserved and uii- 

*S«e filet of Bottoii Gaz«tt« i> Library of Coiigreti. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES £9 

questioned right to withdraw from the Union, 
rather than violate the Constitution under which 
we lived. 

Time was now fully ripe for those scheming dis- 
unionists to put in effect the threats, and bring to 
fruition the plots which, for twenty years, they 
had been breathing and incubating ; and this orig- 
inal secession movement reached its culmination 
in the famous Hartford Convention. 

As previously noted, this movement was first 
set in motion by the publication of the Pelham 
Papers in the Hartford Courant commencing in 
1798.' Moved by the spirit and led by the teach- 
ings of these publications, various acts and utter- 
ances, both by legislative enactment and the pop- 
ular voice, paved the way for the assembling of 
that body of secessionists at Hartford. In the 
Massachusetts Legislature on June 15, 1813, Jo- 
siah Quincy offered a resolution which declared 
that "in a war like the present, waged withop' 
justifiable cause and prosecuted in a manner 
which indicates that conquest and ambition are 
its real motives, it is not becoming a moral and 
religious people to express any approbation of 
military or naval exploits which are not immedi- 
ately connected with the defence of our seacoast 
and soil." On February 18, 1814, a report to the 
Massachusetts Legislature declared, almost in the 
exact language of Madison's Virginia Resolution 
in 1798. that, "Whenever the National Compact is 
violated and the citizens of the State oppressed 
by cruel and unauthorized laws, the Legislature 

JScvidder's American Commonwealths— Connecticut, pp. 350-52. 



30 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

is bound to interpose its power and wrest from 
the oppressor its victim.'" On October 16, the 
Legislature of Massachusetts voted to raise a 
million dollars to support a State army of ten 
thousand men to protect her own borders inde- 
pendent of the National Government and to re- 
quest the New England States to meet in conven- 
tion for the furtherance of her scneme to estab- 
lish a government apart from, and independent of, 
the existing Union. 

Two days later, on the 18th day of October, the 
Legislature in joint session, by the overwhelming 
vote of 226 to 67, appointed twelve delegates to 
represent the State of Massachusetts in the seces- 
sion convention. By similar joint action the 
Legislature of Connecticut appointed seven dele- 
gates, and the Legislature of Rhode Island ap- 
pointed four. New Hampshire sent two delegates 
and Vermont one, all of whom were appointed by 
Conventions of the people.- 

The Convention met at Hartford, Connecticut, 
on December 15, 1814, and remained in session 
three weeks, adjourning on the 5th of January, 
1815. Bishop Chase, of the Episcopal Church, 
was requested to open the Convention with prayer 
but refused, saying he "knew no form of prayer 
for rebellion." 

All the deliberations of the Convention were 
conducted in secret session behind closed doors, 
therefore contemporary histories contain no de- 
tailed accounts of the debates and deliberative 

iProf. Hart, Epochs of American History, pp. 216-17. 
SDwiK'lifs History of flic Hartford Convention. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 31 

actions of the body. Its sessions, however, were 
closely watched by the loyal and conservative ele- 
ment on the outside and at intervals a file of sol- 
diers were marched around the building, followed 
by the usual j^atherinj? of boys and young men, 
with fife and drum in derision and contempt play- 
ing the "Rogue's March." 

Mr. Jefferson, in his correspondence wrote of 
the Convention while in session, "It is a disagree- 
able circumstance, but not a dangerous one. If 
they become neutral we are sufficient for one 
enemy without them ; and, in fact, we get no aid 
from them now." 

Although all its deliberations had been in 
secret, the Convention, on adjournment, adopted 
a final and full report which was widely published. 
This report submitted a long list of proposed 
amendments to the Federal Constitution which 
were so sweeping and radical in their demands 
that compliance therewith would have stripped 
the General Government of practically all finan- 
cial and military support and effected a virtual 
dissolution of the Constitution. Thinly veiled 
behind the whole report was an implied deter- 
mination to withdraw from the Union unless 
those demands were met and complied with. 
Thus, the report declared that the Constitution 
had been violated and that "States which have 
no common umpire must be their own judges and 
execute their own decisions."^ 

Provision was also made for another Conven- 



iMcDonald's Select Documents, pp. 189-207; Jiart's Epochs of 
American History, pp. 217-18. 



32 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

tion to meet in Boston on the second Thursday 
in June following, to put in effect the line of 
action marked out by the Hartford Convention, 
such action, of course, to be determined by the 
disposition made of the report by Congress, before 
which body it was to be laid. 

The Legislatures of Massachusetts and Con- 
necticut appointed three Commissioners to pro- 
ceed to Washington and lay this ultimatum before 
the General Government, but before they arrived 
at the Capital news reached them that peace with 
England had been declared and the report was 
never submitted. I have dwelt thus upon these 
purely historical facts and incidents for two rea- 
sons, first, to show that up to the time when the 
Southern States quietly seceded, thus doing ex- 
actly what the New England States had so early, 
so often and so persistently threatened to do, but 
had not the moral courage to put into effect, no 
party of men, and no section of the country had 
ever thought of denying or questioning the legal 
and moral right of the States to withdraw from 
the Union whenever their Constitutional rights 
were violated or disregarded by the general Gov- 
ernment ; the right of secession had, in the superb 
language of John W. Daniel, "been preached upon 
the hustings, enunciated in political platforms, 
proclaimed in the Senate and in the House of 
Representatives, embodied in our literature, 
taught in schools and Colleges, interwoven with 
the texts of our jurisprudence and maintained by 
scholars, statesmen and constituencies of all States 
and sections of the country," the States, them^ 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 83 

selves, to be the Judges of when and how those 
rights were violated; and, secondly, to show and 
impress upon our children, what all the world 
now knows, that the New England States were 
the hotbed from which sprang the original doc- 
trine of secession, and their soil the fruitful field 
in which were propagated the noxious and noi- 
some weeds of sectional hatred and political dis- 
solution. 

Thus foiled and headed off, as we have seen, 
in their nefarious scheming and intrigue to an- 
tagonize the sections and overthrow the Govern- 
ment established by Washington and Jefferson 
and Madison, and finding themselves permanent- 
ly driven from power by the Jeffersonian, or 
Democratic Party, the old disunion Party of Ham- 
ilton and Adams, following the suggestion of the 
British conspirator, Henry, who was exposed and 
driven from the country by President Madison, 
set about to find some sectional and social issue 
on which they could rally and keep alive their 
waning partisan strength. 

They settled upon Negro Slavery, that "Hion of 
all our woes." The Southern States, and especial- 
ly Virginia, had always opposed slavery, and 
struggled hard to resist and prevent its introduc- 
tion into the Colonies. "Again and again," ac- 
cording to the historian, Bancroft, "they had 
passed laws restraining the importation of slaves 
from Africa, but all their laws were disallowed"^ 
and set aside by the ruling powers, both at home 
and across the sea. Finally, in 1772, the House of 

iHistory United States, Bancroft, Vol. 3, p. 410. 



34 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

Burgesses of Virjjfinia addressed a pathetic peti- 
tion directly to the Kinj^ of Enghind imploring 
"Your Majesty's paternal assistance in averting a 
calamity of the most alarming nature. The im- 
portation of slaves from the coast of Africa hath 
long been considered as a trade of great inhuman- 
ity, and under its present encouragement we have 
too much reason to fear will endanger the very 
existence of your Majesty's American domin- 
ions."- But the King and his Ministers continued 
to turn a deaf ear to all such appeals, and George 
the Third issued instructions under his own hand 
commanding the Governor of the Colony "upon 
pain of the highest displeasure to assent to no 
laws by which the importation of slaves should 
be in any respect prohibited or obstructed." 

That the wild rage of New England fanaticism 
aroused and exhibited by the leaders of the old 
disunion party in prosecuting their newly dis- 
covered fad of abolitionism arose from any love 
for, or sympathy with, the negro is too shallow 
and transparent a pretense to need serious refuta- 
tion. Slavery had existed in every one of the 
Northern States, and the wealthy ship owners of 
New England were actively engaged in the in- 
famf)us but lucrative slave trade, and many of the 
leaders of their party had grown rich by bringing 
negroes to our shores and selling them to the 
Southern planters. But the climate of the North- 
ern States was so cold, and the main industries 
of New England being directed to manufactures 
and commerce, the savage and untutored negro 

-Journal of the Uousc of Burgcssis, p. IJl. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 35 

from the hot jungles of Africa was found to be 
unprofitable, and after the most salable and valu- 
able had been run off and sold to the South, and 
the money securely pocketed, the few remaining 
were declared free. 

The most convincing and damning proof of the 
insincerity and hypocrisy of New England's pre- 
tended love for the negro and abhorence of slavery 
was shown in the framing and adoption of the 
Federal Constitution in 1787. Then was the su- 
preme opportunity for the suppression of the 
abominable slave trade thus paving the way for 
gradual and final emancipation. Virginia lal3ored 
earnestly, entreated, implored and voted for its 
immediate suppression, in which she was joined 
by New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, but 
the votes of New Hampshire, Massachusetts and 
Connecticut caused its defeat and secured a pro- 
longation of the infamous traflftc for twenty years, 
from 1787 to 1808.' Thus the avarice and in- 
humanity of New England obtained for her a 
twenty years' extension of license to prey upon a 
harmless and inoffensive race, and fill her coffers 
with blood money wrung from the helpless Afri- 
can, while she had ample time either to dispose 
of her ships or direct her commerce into other 
channels. 

'Critical Periods in American History, p. 264. 



CHAPTER III. 



After the adoption of the "Missouri Compro- 
mise" and the admission of that State into the 
Union, by which measures slavery was restricted 
to the territory south of a line running thirty-six 
degrees and thirty minutes North, a season of 
comparative quiet ensued during which period ex- 
tending from 1820 to 1840, arose the great issues 
of Bank, Tariff and other questions of internal 
policy upon which parties divided and which were 
fought out under the leadership of such men as 
Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Hayne and other 
patriots and statesmen of national fame. 

But all that while the leaven of abolitionism 
was working quietly and insidiously among the 
masses of New England, and fanatics sprang up 
all over the country, proclaiming "the enormity 
of slavery as a sin and a crime against God." 

In 1821 was commenced the publication of the 
first Abolition paper called "The Genius of Uni- 
versal Emancipation." In 1823 the first Abolition 
Society was organized, and similar societies 
sprang up in rapid succession all over New Eng- 
land. Money was lavished to spread the new 
doctrine that slavery was "a crime," and slave- 
holders were "thieves" and "murderers." These 
slanders upon such men as Washington, Jeffer- 
son, Madison and many other great and good men, 
statesmen whose valor and patriotism and wis- 
dom had achieved the independence of the country 
and established th« Government, all of whom 



38 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

were slaveholders, at first provoked difficulties 
and riots all over the North, the people being, as 
yet, unperverted by the abominable and disgust- 
ing teachings of negro equality and miscegena- 
tion. In 1884 the house of an abolition leader was 
mobbed in New York; the church of an abolition 
preacher was attacked, and a hall in which an 
abolition meeting was being held in Philadelphia, 
was burned down.' 

Still, those raving fanatics continued their work 
of printing books, tracts, pamphlets, magazines 
and newspapers and scattering them broadcast 
over the country without money and without 
price. They had, at last, found a "sectional issue" 
and a "social question" upon which they could 
vent all their fanatical rage, and enlist and com- 
bine all their powers and resources — hate-inspired 
falsehood and misrepresentations — to drive the 
South from a Union which they, themselves, had 
always hated, and from which, for seventy years, 
had been longing and threatening to withdraw. 

No question could have been better suited to 
their purpose. The great body of the negroes 
were in the Southern States, and the Northern peo- 
ple outside of New England, in those states where 
slavery had never found a foothold, or, long since, 
had ceased to exist, did not, and could not under- 
stand the real facts and the true conditions of the 
slaves of the South. They, therefore, were de- 
pendent on, and fain to accei>t, the reports and 
pamphlets and newspapers published mostly by 
unprincipled men and ambitious politicians, and 

l\'oulli's History ot the (irc-at Civil War, p. 445. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 39 

such books as Uncle Tom's Cabin, itself a vile 
slander and misleading libel on the whole South- 
ern people. 

It is a simple historical fact now recognized 
everywhere, and which no well-informed, un- 
prejudiced and truth-loving man or woman will 
wish or dare to deny, that the four million slaves 
of the South were the best cared for, best con- 
ditioned and most contented and happy body of 
negroes that ever existed on earth ; and our form 
of society had civilized and Christianized them as 
no section of the negro race had ever been civil- 
ized and Christianized before. 

But the abolitionists screamed and shouted 
from the housetops, and proclaimed with blare of 
trumpets through the land that the Constitution 
framed, and the Government established by Wash- 
ington and Jefferson and Madison and Mason pro- 
tected the Southern people in the most shameful 
and sinful and cruel system of oppression ever 
inflicted on a helpless and downtrodden people. 

William Lloyd Garrison, who has the unenvi- 
able distinction of being the father of the abolition 
societies, commenced his great abolition move- 
ment by publicly burning the Constitution of the 
United States. And years afterwards he declared 
in a speech that: "No act of ours do we regard 
with more conscientious approval or higher satis- 
faction than when, sevei-al years ago, on the 
Fourth of July, in the presence oi' a great as- 
sembly we committed to the flames the Constitu- 
tion of the United States." 

And he said on another occasion : "This Union 



40 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

is a lie! The American Union is an imposture — 
a covenant with death and an agreement with 
hell. I am for its overthrow. Up with the flag 
of disunion !" 

Wendell Phillips, perhaps the ablest of all the 
abolition leaders, said : "The Constitution of our 
fathers was a mistake. Tear it to pieces and make 
a better one. Our aim is disunion, breaking up 
of the States." At an annual abolition convention 
a resolution was adopted which reads : "Resolved, 
that the abolitionists of this country should make 
it one of the primary objects of this agitation to 
dissolve the American Union." And these same 
people and their descendants have since had the 
brazen effrontery to declare that John C. Calhoun, 
of South Carolina, was the father of disunion. 

Mr. Calhoun, in a speech in the United States 
Senate on March 7, 1850, said: "No man would 
feel more happy than myself to believe that this 
Union, formed by our ancestors, should live for- 
ever. Looking back to the long course of forty 
years service here, I have the consolation to believe 
that I have never done one act to weaken it — that 
I have done full justice to all sections. And if I 
have ever been exposed to the imputation of a 
contrary motive, it is because I have been willing 
to defend my section from unconstitutional en- 
croachments." And in another speech the same 
great statesman said : "Abolition is the only ques- 
tion of suiiiciont magnitude and potency to divide 
this Union, and divide it, it will, or drench the 
country in blood, if not arrested. There are those 
who see no danger to the Union in the violation 




HE PERRY PICTURES. 



ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 
1 757-1804. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 41 

of all its fundamental principles, but are full of 
apprehension when danger is foretold. If my 
attachment for the Union were less, I might 
tamper with the deep disease that now afflicts the 
body politic, and keep silent until the patient was 
ready to sink under the mortal blows." 

Thus this great Southern statesman, when he 
knew that he was nearing the end of his career 
and of his life, yet thrilling with undying love for 
the Union and the Constitution, heard the mut- 
tering thunders, saw with prophetic ken the gath- 
ering storm, and warned his countrymen, both 
North and South, to rise up in their might and 
suppress it. 

Jefferson Davis, who was a member during the 
same term of the United States Senate, said in a 
speech delivered in that body on June 27, 1850: 
"If I have a superstition, Sir, which governs my 
mind and holds it captive, it is a superstitious 
reverence for the Union. If one can inherit a sen- 
timent I may be said to have inherited this from 
my revolutionary father." 

By all the preceding facts and utterances, culled 
from the authentic histories of the times, it is 
clearly established beyond doubt or cavil, that the 
wicked doctrine of disunionism had its birth and 
origin in the North; and while the abolitionists 
were boldly and wickedly preaching up a mad cru- 
sade against the Union, and educating a genera- 
tion to hate the Government of our fathers, South- 
ern men and the great leaders of the South were 
begging, imploring and pleading for "Union, Con- 
stitution and Enforcement of the Laws." 



CHAPTER IV. 



After the great questions of Bank and Tariff, 
which, for twenty years had arrayed the two great 
parties of the country, the Whig and the Demo- 
cratic parties, against each other in fiery debate, 
though without sectional bitterness, had been, as 
it was hoped, finally disposed of, and during the 
season of quiet which followed the Whig party 
commenced gradually to dissolve and disintegrate, 
although they put a national ticket for President 
in the field in 1860. After that campaign, and 
during the momentous events which followed the 
party disappeared entirely, as an organization, 
from the arena of American politics. 

But during the latter part of the period men- 
tioned, from 1850 to 1854, a shrewd and unscru- 
pulous politician, William H. Seward, of New 
York, conceived the plan of creating a new po- 
litical party on which he could, himself, ride into 
power. Seward commenced life as a "Yankee 
Schoolmaster" in the South, where he was treated 
with that kind but condescending indifference ac- 
corded to all of his hireling class of adventurers 
by the proud and highminded planters and landed 
proprietors of that section. General Donn Piatt, 
who rose to a position of prominence in the Fed- 
eral Army, was a personal friend of Seward, 
whom he thus describes in his character sketches 
after the war : "Seward looked down on the white 
men of the South in the same cynical way that he 
did upon the slaves. He had no pity for the slaves 



44 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

and no hatred for the master. He had contempt 
for them all, which he concealed as carefully as he 
did his contempt for the United States Constitu- 
tion. Seward had trained himself to believe that 
worldly wickedness indicated ability. He thought 
to be bad was to be clever. He thought devotion 
to wine, women and infidelity gave proof of su- 
perior intelligence. He affected a wickedness he 
did not always feel because such wickedness, in his 
estimation, was good form.'" 

In politics Seward was a Hamiltonian Federal- 
ist, who had been Governor of the State of New 
York and was now in the United States Senate. 
The old Federalist party, long ago crushed and 
driven from power, had lain broken and helpless 
for more than two decades. Seward knew that 
the abolitionists of New England had, by thirty 
years of education of the public mind and the 
persistent training of a rising generation, created 
throughout the North a passionate and undying 
liatred of the South and her institutions, and he 
determined, by uniting that element with the 
broken remains of the old Federalist organization, 
to create a new sectional party which should sweep 
itself into power and secure the darling and long 
cherished purpose of both factions — the overthrow 
of the Constitution and the destruction of the 
labor system of the South. 

With that wicked programme in view this wily 
politician, William II. Seward, who afterwards 
became Secretary of State in Lincoln's Cabinet, 
and, as such, the real head of the Federal Govern- 

iThc iMcn Who Saved the I'nion. Doiin Pratt, pp. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 45 

ment, issued a call for a Convention to meet at 
Auburn, New York, on September 26, 1854, "to 
organize a Republican Party which shall represent 
the friends of freedom." This meeting of de- 
structionists determined to issue a call for a Con- 
vention to be composed of delegates from the 
Northern states only, to meet on July 4, 1856, and 
nominate a candidate for President of the United 
States. The Convention met according to pro- 
gramme and nominated John C. Fremont. 

Thus was born that purely sectional party 
which arbitrarily assumed the honored name 
previously borne by the followers of Jefferson, and 
was known throughout the War and the darker 
Reconstruction Period which followed, as the 
Black Republican Party; a party which deluged 
the country with blood, sacrificed a million lives 
and destroyed untold billions of property — an ap- 
palling hecatomb piled on the altar of sectional 
hate and unreasoning fanaticism. 

Then arose the great Kansas excitement. 
Kansas was a territory lying west of the State of 
Missouri, and, therefore, south of the extended 
line of 36 degrees and 30 minutes which was 
agreed upon by the "Missouri Compromise" as the 
northern limit of slavery. When this territory 
After the word "slavery" in 8th line from bottom of 
page 45 read: But that provision of the "Missouri Com- 
promise" was automatically repealed by the passage, in 
1854. of the "Kansas-Nebraska Bill" which gave to the 
people of those territories the right to decide for them- 
selves the question of "slavery" or "no slavery" whenever 
they should organize state governments and make applica- 
tion for admission as states into the Union. When, under 
those circumstances, Kansas was thrown open to settle- 
ment it became at once apparent that the territory would 
be occupied largely by Southern people moving into the 
new El Dorado and taking their slaves with them. The 
abolitionists, etc. 



46 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

tionists were rushed out to take possession of the 
country and prevent it from becoming a "Slave 
State." 

One of the leaders of those adventurers was 
John Brown, whose aim and ambition was to get 
up a war if he could. The abolition preachers 
all over New England were active and zealous in 
exciting their people to deeds of violence and 
bloodshed. 

Henry Ward Beecher. the idolized and lionized 
pastor of the famous "Plymouth Congregation," 
told his people that in dealing with slaveholders 
"Sharp's rifles are better than Bibles," and that 
"it is a crime to shoot at a slaveholder and not hit 
him." 

All over New England and largely in the North- 
ern States this fanaticism prevailed. Ministers 
of the Gospel of Peace bought and distributed 
guns and rifles for the Devil's work of crime and 
l)loodshod. The North was being slowly but sure- 
ly educated for the carnival of slaughter and arson 
that speedily followed. 

I have shown indisputably all through this 
paper that there had always existed at the North 
a powerful element opposed to the Union as it was 
formed and the Government as it was administ- 
ered. Yet, throughout that long period from the 
formation of the Government, in 1787. to Lin- 
coln's election in 1860. not one single Southern 
statesman ever raised his voice against the Union 
as it was organized by our patriotic forefathers. 
The South was solid in its admiration of, and its 
devotion to the principles of Government on which 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 47 

the Union was founded. But on this vital subject 
the North was divided. The Democratic party 
was attached to the Union and devoted to its 
principles. The Black Republican party was an 
enemy to both the Union and the Constitution. 

As already shown, there were in the Republican 
party as organized, two factions, the fanatical 
abolitionists, and the survivors or representatives 
of the old Federalist or Hamiltonian party. But 
they were united in their desire and aim to trample 
upon the Constitution and revolutionize the Gov- 
ernment; and nothing that the South could have 
done less than an entire and absolute surrender 
of her institutions and all her rights as separate 
and independent states would have satisfied them. 
Their plans and intentions were plainly set forth 
in a speech by Governor Banks, of Massachusetts, 
in 1856, in which he said : "I can conceive of a 
time when this Constitution shall not be in exist- 
ence — when we shall have an absolute dictatorial 
government transmitted from age to age, with 
men at its head who are made rulers by military 
commission, or who claim an hereditary right to 
govern those over whom they are placed." When 
the war which those unreasoning fanatics forced 
upon the South did finally burst in all its fury, this 
same Banks became a General in the invading 
army, and after his flight across the Potomac from 
the Shenandoah Valley to escape the pursuing 
vengeance of Stonewall Jackson's "foot cavalry," 
in another speech at Arlington he said, pointing 
to the Capitol in Washington : "When this war is 
over, that will be the Capitol of a great nation. 



48 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

Then there will be no longer New Yorkers, Penn- 
sylvanians and Virginians, but we shall all be 
simply Americans." Senator Cameron, of Penn- 
sylvania, expressed the same views and sentiments 
at a public dinner in Washington and those views 
were echoed and re-echoed all over the North by 
the henchmen and mouthpieces of the new party, 
l)lainly showing that the aim and object of that 
party was to crush the South into submission, de- 
stroy the autonomy of all the States and consoli- 
date thom all into one great despotic Government. 
And that is exactly the kind of government they 
did force upon the country in the Administration 
of Abraham Lincoln. 



CHAPTER V. 



Lincoln was nominated for the Presidency by 
the Convention which met in Chicago in 1860, and 
the campaign which resulted in his election was 
conducted with such a spirit of violence and ma- 
lignity towards the South that our people were 
thoroughly alarmed and fully convinced that their 
society and their lives would not be safe in the 
Union if that party should come into power. 

An infamous book breathing sedition and mur- 
der had been published the year before known as 
"The Helper Book,'" and a hundred thousand 
copies of it were circulated with money raised by 
subscription among the Black Republican mem- 
bers of Congress. This abominable book boldly 
threatened the people of the South with assassina- 
tion and death by any means that would enable 
those vandals to liberate the slaves and subvert 
the society of the Southern States. A few extracts 
from its murder-breathing pages will suffice to 
fix its infamy forever in the memory of ourselves 
and our children : "Against slaveholders as a 
body we wage exterminating war." "We contend 
that slaveholders are more criminal than common 
murderers." "The negroes, nine cases out of ten, 
would be delighted at the opportunity to cut their 
Masters' throats." 

"Smallpox is a nuisance; strychnine is a nuis- 
ance; mad-dogs are a nuisance, and so are slave- 

iSo called from the name of its author, H. R. Helper, a renegade 
North Carolinian who "left his country for his country's good." — The 
Impending Crisis Dissected, Wolfe, pp. 1-45. 



50 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

holders ; it is our business, nay it is our impera- 
tive duty to abate nuisances ; we propose, there- 
fore, with the exception of strychnine, to extermi- 
nate this catalogue from beginning to end.'" 

This outrageous book contained three hundred 
pages of such murderous and abominable stuff 
and, used as a campaign document in the canvass 
that resulted in the election of Abraham Lincoln 
to the Presidency, did not fail to fill the South with 
indignation and alarm. As previously said, the 
leading Republican members of Congress sub- 
scribed for the free distribution of a hundred 
thousand copies; and William H. Seward, the 
originator and father of the Black Republican 
party, gave it his special endorsement in which 
he declared it "a work of great merit." 

The l)ook was preceded and followed by speeches 
and pamphlets from radical politicians all over 
the North that were ecjually disgusting and brutal 
in tone and sentiment. Joshua Giddings, a lead- 
ing politician and Congressman of Ohio (Ohio, 
one of the five states that Virginia had presented 
as a free gift to the Union), said in one of those 
bitter and murderous harangues: "I look for- 
ward to a day when I shall see a servile insurrec- 
tion in the South. When the black man, supplied 
with bayonets, shall wage a war of extermination 
against the whites; when the master shall see his 
dwelling in flames and his hearth polluted; and 
though I may not mock at their calamity and 
laugh when their fear cometh, yet I shall hail it as 
the dawn of a political millenium." 

iThc Impending Crisis in the South, H. R. Helper, pp. 120-139. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 51 

Erastus Hopkins said : "If peaceful means fail 
us and we are driven to the last extremity when 
ballots are useless, then we will make bullets 
effective." 

For years Northern pulpits and Northern news- 
papers and pamphlets and books had boiled and 
seethed and bubbled over with such bloody threats 
against the people of the South, who had never 
harmed or given them cause for offense and only 
asked to be let alone. 

But time was now fully ripe to wreak their 
causeless vengeance and put their bloody threats 
into execution. In 1859, less than two years be- 
fore the election of Lincoln, John Brown, a native 
of New England and a sojourner in Kansas, came 
into Virginia with a band of men for the purpose 
of inciting and leading an insurrection of the 
negroes to murder the white men and women and 
children of the South. Brown and his gang of 
murderers were armed themselves, and supplied 
with "pikes, "^ made in New England, to distribute 
to the negroes, who were ignorant of the use of 
firearms, and plenty of guns and ammunition 
bought with money secretly contributed in the 
North, with which they hoped to inaugurate a gen- 
eral uprising, and a regular holocaust of murder, 
arson and rapine. 

But the plot was discovered and nipped in the 
bud by the prompt and timely action of the State 
and Federal authorities, and Brown and his gang 
were captured and hung by regular process of law 

IQne of those pikes is now on exiliibition in the Slate Library at 
Richmond. 



52 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

in the Virginia courts. The calm, deliberate and 
lawful execution of this man by the sovereign and 
outraged State of Virginia caused a fearful out- 
break of fury and rage and redoubled threats of 
retaliatory vengeance at the North. 

Prayer meetings were held in most of the 
churches in New England and practically through- 
out the North and West, including "Bleeding 
Kansas," who has placed a statue of Brown in the 
Hall of Fame at the Nation's Capitol, where he 
stands shoulder to shoulder with those peerless 
gentlemen and patriots, George Washington and 
Robert E. Lee. 

Those prayer meetings were held to invoke the 
vengeance of Heaven on those who had caused the 
just penalty of the law to fall upon one of the most 
pitiless murderers ever known in the criminal 
annals of this country, and bells were tolled to 
glorify his memory. At a public meeting in 
Massachusetts, attended by United States Sena- 
tors and other men of prominence in the i)olitical 
history of the Puritan State, it was unanimously 
"Resolved, that it is the right and duty of slaves 
to resist their masters, and the right and duty of 
the people of the North to incite them to resist- 
ance and to aid them in it." 

At Rocheford, Illinois, a public meeting called 
by the leading citizens, unanimously "Resolved, 
that the City bells be tolled one hour in commem- 
oration of John Brown." 

Horace Greeley, the famous founder and Editor 
of the New York Tribune, and one of the head- 
lights of the abolition party, said: "Let no one 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 53 

doubt that History will accord an honorable niche 
to John Brown." 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose writings, when 
purged of the taint of New England fanaticism, 
are read and admired and quoted approvingly in 
two hemispheres, said that the hanging of Brown, 
"made the gallows as glorious as the Cross." And 
afterwards he added to that sacriligious utterance 
the further information that "Our Captain Brown 
is happily a representative of the American Re- 
public. He did not believe in moral suasion, but 
in putting things through." 

A volume of many thousand pages might be 
filled with similar extracts from sermons, prayers, 
speeches and newspapers all over the North, show- 
ing the spirit of wild fanaticism and venomous 
hate that had taken possession of the public mind, 
or at least, the mind of that portion of the public 
that was swayed by such fanatical teachers as 
Garrison and Phillips and Emerson and Beecher 
and Seward and their immediate dupes and fol- 
lowers. 

It was in the midst of this wild excitement that 
Lincoln was nominated for the Presidency by the 
party which had so universally endorsed and abet- 
ted Old John Brown's murderous raid into Vir- 
ginia. 

Thoroughly aroused and alarmed, the Southern 
people demanded a pledge or guarantee that the 
bloody and diabolical threats which had been so 
boldly and boastfully made against their institu- 
tions and property and lives should not be put 
into effect in case the Black Republican party 



54 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

should come into power and get possession of the 
Government. Instead of pledges and reasonable 
assurances, they received sneers, abuse, re- 
proaches, insults and additional threats. 

The fact is, as was clearly indicated then by 
"the signs of the times" and fully proven since by 
the developments of historical truth, the abolition 
leaders were fully determined on war; and all 
their tricks and cunning were brought into play 
to goad or exasperate the South to commit what 
they chose to call an "overt act" to give them an 
excuse to let loose the dogs of war. 

As already shown, and as all history fully sub- 
stantiates, the Southern people had always been 
contented with the Union as it was established by 
the fathers, and only desired and demanded their 
just and equal rights under the Constitution. On 
the other hand the facts are equally patent and 
indisputable that in the North there had always 
been a busy and restless party working, by fair 
means and foul, to undermine and overthrow the 
Union because they hated the Constitution and 
were jealous of, and at enmity with the South be- 
cause of her controlling influence in the formation 
and administration of the Government, and of the 
old grudge growing out of the early conflict be- 
tween the Monarchial principles of Alexander 
Hamilton and the free Democratic principles of 
Thomas Jefferson, which latter principles pre- 
vailed and triumphed to the utter confusion and 
overthrow of the former. This old enmity and 
hatred on the part of the North had smouldered 
and burned with more or less intensitv ever since 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 55 

the formation of the Government and now, re- 
cruited and strengthened by the fiery and fanati- 
cal element of New England abolitionism, the com- 
bined forces felt themselves strong enough to 
precipitate on the South the long threatened and 
long dreaded war. 




THE PERRY PICTURES. 2526. _ 

BOSTON EDIT ION JEFFtRSOM L) A V I 



CHAPTER VI. 



Lincoln was elected in the fall of 1860. He car- 
ried every Northern State except New Jersey, thus 
receiving a majority of the electoral votes, but he 
was in a minority of a million and a half of the 
popular vote. The Southern people were now 
thoroughly and fully aroused to the threatening 
and dangerous situation of affairs. The party 
coming into power had openly and persistently 
declared unrelenting and exterminating war 
against them. The Chicago platform was shrewd- 
ly and cautiously worded, but the spirit and temper 
of the party that promulgated it had previously 
been fully revealed and set forth by the violent 
and revolutionary utterances of its leading men 
all over the North, as hereinbefore extensively 
quoted. 

As showing that the same spirit and intentions 
still prevailed, Joshua R. Giddings, of Ohio, whose 
speech on a former occasion is noticed on a previ- 
ous page of this paper, declared on the floor of 
the Chicago Convention that its nominees could 
not get the support of the Abolition wing of the 
party unless the resolutions pledged the party as 
a whole to carry out the doctrine that "all men 
are created equal," which, in the abolition creed, 
had always meant negro emancipation and negro 
equality. 

Thus, by a cunning and false use of a popular 
phrase in the Declaration of Independence, the Chi- 
cago Convention pledged itself to unprovoked and 



58 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

unjust war upon the South to overturn and destroy 
Southern society, as it existed, and make the negro 
the political and social equal of the white man, 
"peaceably, perhaps, if they were permitted to do 
so, but forcibly if they must," And William H. 
Seward had avowed the same sentiment in a 
speech in the United States Senate. In the lan- 
guage telegraphed to his constituents by the Hon. 
J. L. M. Curry, then a member of Congress from 
Alabama, "the last argument for peace had been 
exhausted" and it was to save themselves from 
such a destructive and ruinous war that the South- 
ern States determined to withdraw quietly and 
peaceably from the Union. 

As previously shown, their right to do so had 
never been questioned or denied. They had all 
joined the Union without compulsion and by their 
own voluntary act, and the best and wisest men, 
both North and South, had always held and de- 
clared that the States, having only delegated cer- 
tain powers to the Federal Government, could re- 
sume those powers whenever their interests and 
welfare demanded it. 

As long ago as 1811 Josiah Quincy, of Massa- 
chusetts, an original and bitter Federalist, who 
was a member of Congress during Jefferson's ad- 
ministration, and who lived long enough to become 
a warm friend and supporter of Lincoln and the 
abolitionists, said in a speech against the bill to 
admit Louisiana as a State into the Union that, 
if the bill passed, "it will be the right of all and 
the (I lit If of some to prepare for separation ; ami- 
cably if they can, forcibly if they must." A mem- 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 59 

ber called Mr. Quincy to order for making a 
"treasonable utterance" but the House of Repre- 
sentatives fully sustained him. 

Judge William Rawle, of Pennsylvania, one of 
the ablest constitutional lav^yers in the United 
States, whom Washington appointed United States 
District Attorney in 1791, and afterwards ten- 
dered him a seat in his Cabinet, said in his book 
"Views of the United States Constitution:" "It 
depends on the State itself whether it will con- 
tinue a member of the Union. To deny this right 
would be inconsistent with the principles upon 
which our political systems were founded. The 
States, may wholly withdraw from the Union, but 
while they continue they must retain the character 
of representative republics." 

President Jefferson expressed the same view 
in a few words : "States may wholly withdraw 
their delegated powers." President Madison, in 
speaking of the States as the parties to a com- 
pact, said : "The States, themselves, must be the 
judges in the last resort whether the bargain 
made has been preserved or broken." 

In 1833 President John Quincy Adams said if 
secession ever occurred "it would be better for 
the people of these disunited States to part in 
peace from each other than to be held together 
by constraint." 

In 1850 Salmon P. Chase, afterwards Chief 
Justice of the United States, said in a speech in 
the United States Senate that "in the case of a 
State resuming her powers I know of no remedy 
to prevent it." In 1861 Edward Everett, of 



60 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

Massachusetts, said: "To expect to hold fifteen 
States in the Union by force is preposterous. If 
our sister States must leave us, in the name of 
Heaven let them go in peace." Three days before 
South Carolina seceded, Horace Greeley said in the 
New York Tribune, which was always acknowl- 
edged as a leading organ of the Republican party, 
that "the Declaration of Independence fully justi- 
fied her in the act." And again in February, 18G1, 
the same paper said : "If the Cotton States desire 
to form an independent nation they have a clear 
moral right to do so." 

And Abraham Lincoln, himself, after his in- 
auguration as President, speaking through his 
Secretary of State, William H. Seward, on the 10th 
of April, 1861, said that he was "not disposed to 
reject a cardinal dogma of their (the Secession- 
ists) namely, that the Federal Government cannot 
reduce the seceding States to obedience by con- 
quest even if he were disposed to question the 
proposition; but, in fact, the President willingly 
accepts it as true."' 

Thus when in the light of all history, extending 
over a period of seventy years, and largely drawn 
from the acts and utterances of their own writers, 
speakers and leaders, the Southern States, fully 
convinced by a long and bitter experience of the 
impossibility of living together in a state of peace 
and harmony under the same Government with 
their bitter and implacable enemies, determined, 
purely as an act of self-defence, and self-preserva- 
tion, to quietly, and, they hoped, peacefully, with- 

'Lfttcrs and Stato Papers of ANraliam Lincoln, X. & II. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 61 

draw from the Union, which all history shows, 
and all the world is now convinced, they had a 
perfect right to do, a wild hue and cry was raised 
all over the North by the same people and the 
same party who had always desired and threatened 
to do the same thing, that the South had made war 
on the Government for the purpose of "destroying 
the Union and perpetuating slavery." 

Their act of withdrawal was in no possible sense 
a declaration of war upon the Federal Govern- 
ment. They had simply exercised their undeniable 
and unquestionable right, as expressed in the 
language of both Washington and Jefferson, "to 
resume their delegated powers" for the purpose of 
governing themselves, and conducting their own 
affairs in their own way without the continual 
intermeddling of New England fanatics who were 
never satisfied to "attend to their own business 
and leave their neighbors to do the same." 

The Federal Government, with Abraham Lin- 
coln as a convenient and pliant tool at its head, 
was driven by the whip and spur of those wild 
and unreasoning fanatics to inaugurate a bloody 
and cruel and unjust war upon a numerically weak 
and defenceless people who only asked to be let 
alone. 

In retiring from the Union the seceding States 
offered and entreated peaceful negotiations in re- 
gard to all the public property claimed by the Fed- 
eral Government within the jurisdiction of the re- 
tiring States. The forts and public buildings 
which they seized and offered to pay for could 
not have been built without the consent and co- 



62 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

operation of the States in which they were locat- 
ed ; they were built for the protection of the har- 
bors and cities of those States ; they were, there- 
fore, "partnership property" each of the States 
being an equal partner in their ownership, and 
necessarily w^ent with the withdrawing States who 
were willing, and offered to pay a just proportion 
of their cost. 

Thus, the seceding States expressed an earnest 
desire to adjust all matters of dispute or conten- 
tion by mutual and friendly agreement. They 
were neither rebels nor traitors. They acted pure- 
ly upon their Constitutional rights, as were de- 
clared and acknowledged by the ablest Statesmen 
and patriots of all parties and all sections in all 
ages of the Government, and upon what was the 
unanimous understanding of the States when they 
adopted the Constitution. Not a single State 
would ever have become a member of the Union 
had she imagined that the Federal Government 
thus instituted w^ould ever attempt to hold them 
in it by war and bloodshed. 

But our wise and far-seeing Statesman and 
orator. Patrick Henry, foresaw the danger, and 
with all the thunders of his mighty eloquence 
warned his compatriots of the "poison under its 
wings," and, by his urgent and persistent advice, 
the State of Virginia, in her act of ratification and 
acceptance, inserted a clause expressly reserving 
the right to withdraw from the Union whenever 
her rights and privileges under the Constitution 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 63 

were or should be violated or endangered without 
redress/ 

The leaders of the party that forced and pre- 
cipitated the war on the South, when they raised 
the diabolical cry of "rebel" and "traitor," knew 
in their hypocritical hearts that we were not trait- 
ors. They, or the majority of them had always 
been disunionists themselves. Many of them had 
been talking and writing and threatening seces- 
sion for thirty years, and their fathers and pre- 
decessors had done the same thing for more than 
forty years before them. It was not love for the 
Union that caused them to wage the war. With 
some it was a settled and fiendish hatred of the 
South, with others a foolish and fanatical love 
of the negro, (at a distance), and with others, 
still — the descendants and successors of the old 
Federalist element — a traitorous desire to over- 
throw the free Government of the United States 
and establish a consolidated or "strong" govern- 
ment after annihilating the sovereignty of the 
States. So much for the leaders. 

Of the great mass of soldiers that were drawn 
into it some were, doubtless, moved by patriotic 
motives, others of the more ignorant and least in- 
formed were made to believe that the South had 
declared war against the North, and others, still, 
were swept into the vortex without any motive at 
all. In the language of a Northern historian, who 
saw and knew whereof he wrote : "A wild and 
senseless excitement had broken out. Men did 
not reason, they raved. Those who hesitated and 

iLife of Patrick Henry, Wm. Wirt and Debates of the Virginia 
Convention. 



64 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

asked 'Why' were knocked down, and the BlacK 
Repul)lic-an leaders instigated their followers to 
mob and intimidate and overawe every man who 
dared to think for himself, and reason or argue 
about the causes and object of the war.'" 

South Carolina seceded in December, 1860. She 
was followed in quick succession by all the Gulf 
States, including Plorida and Louisiana, in Janu- 
ary, 18G1. 

The South had always loved the Union, and did 
all she possibly could do with honor and self-re- 
spect to preserve its integrity without an ignoble 
and pusillanimous surrender of the rights and 
privileges guaranteed to her under the Constitu- 
tion. The spirit of sorrow and deep regret and 
kindly feeling with which she severed her con- 
nection with the Northern States cannot be more 
truly and feelingly expressed than was done by 
those pure patriots and thrice honorable men, Jef- 
ferson Davis, the executive head, who guided the 
destinies of the new born nation, and Robert E. 
Lee, the Commander-in-Chief of her armies in the 
field. In retiring from the United States Senate 
to give his allegiance to, and cast his fortunes 
with his native State of Mississippi, which had 
already seceded, Mr. Davis said in closing one of 
the most feeling and eloquent speeches ever heard 
in that body: "Then, Senators, we recur to the 
compact that binds us together; we recur to the 
principles upon which our Government was found- 
ed ; and when you deny them, and when j'ou deny 
to us the right to withdraw from a Government 
which, thus perverted, threatens to be destructive 

iHistory of the Great Civil War, Ilorton, p. 73, 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 65 

of our rights, we but tread in the path of our 
fathers when we proclaim our independence and 
take the hazard. This is done, not in hostility to 
others, not to injure any section of the country, 
not even for our own pecuniary benefit ; but from 
the high and solemn motive of defending and pro- 
tecting the rights we inherited, and which it is 
our duty to transmit unshorn to our children. I 
am sure I feel no hostility toward you. Senators 
from the North. I am sure there is not one of 
you, whatever sharp discussion there may have 
been between us, to whom I cannot now say in the 
presence of my God, I wish you well ; and I feel I 
but express the desire of the people I represent 
when I say I hope, and they hope, for peaceable 
relations with you, though we must part." 

General Lee said after resigning his commission 
in the United States Army to offer his stainless 
sword to his own beloved Virginia: "All the 
South has ever asked or desired is, that the Union 
founded by our forefathers should be preserved; 
and that the Government, as it was originally 
organized, should be administered in purity and 
truth." 

And as to the monstrous charge, made in the 
face of all the accumulated testimony of half a 
century to the contrary, that the South went to 
war to destroy the Union and perpetuate slavery. 
General Lee said on another occasion: "If I 
owned all the millions of slaves in the South I 
would free them all with a stroke of the pen to 
avert the war !" 

In proof of his sincerity, if any proof were 



66 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

needed, is the well-known fact that he never owned 
a slave, except a few he inherited from his moth- 
er's estate and he emancipated all of them long 
before the war. Stonewall Jackson never owned a 
slave except two, a man and a woman that he 
bought at their own request, and he at once gave 
them the privilege of buying their freedom with 
the wages received for their services to reimburse 
him for the price he paid for them. The man 
accepted the offer and in due time earned his free- 
dom ; but the woman declined the offer and chose 
to remain a servant in General Jackson's family. 
Joseph E. Johnson never owned a slave and, like 
General Lee, was sincerely opposed to slavery. 
A. P. Hill never owned a slave, and regarded 
"slavery as a great evil." J. E. B. Stuart inherit- 
ed one slave from his father, and, while serving 
in the United States army in the far West, pur- 
chased another. Both of these he disposed of long 
before the war — one because of her cruelty to his 
child, and the other he sold to a man who engaged 
to take the negro back to his old home in Ken- 
tucky. 

Fitzhugh Lee never owned a slave. 

Commodore Matthew F, Maury, our great 
"Pathfinder of the Sea," never owned but one 
slave and she, a domestic, voluntarily remained a 
servant and member of his family until her death 
long after the war. 

These are all historical facts duly recorded in 
the papers of the Virginia Historical Society, and 
in the private correspondence of the accomplished 
author of "Virginia's Attitude Towards Slavery 
and Secession," Mr. B. B. Munford. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 67 

So much for the Southern leaders. As to the 
rank and file of that glorious army which fought 
as never men fought, unfed, unclothed and un- 
paid, and wrote the title of American manhood 
and valor and patriotism as high on the scroll of 
fame as was ever reached by any soldiery in the 
records of the world's history, it is a well au- 
thenticated fact that perhaps four-fifths, and cer- 
tainly three-fourths of them never owned a slave. 

Dr. Hunter McGuire, in his admirable work 
"The Confederate Cause and Conduct of the War," 
says of the famous "Stonewall Brigade" whose 
glorious deeds and wonderful achievements in de- 
fence of Southern rights sent a thrill of wonder 
and admiration throughout the world : "I knew 
every man in it, for I belonged to it for a long 
time, and I know that I am in proper bounds when 
I assert that there was not one soldier in thirty 
who owned, or ever expected to own a slave." 

Of the Southern people, described by our aboli- 
tionist slanderers and traducers as a community 
of "Slaveholders," "Slavebreeders" and "Slave- 
dealers," Professor Hart, of Harvard University, 
in his book "Slavery and Abolition," says that 
"Out of twelve million five hundred thousand per- 
sons in the slaveholding communities in 1860, only 
about one in thirty-three was a slaveholder." 

The historian, Rhodes, in his "History of the 
United States," records that after three years of 
bloody war, President Davis said to Lincoln's rep- 
resentatives in conference : "We are not fighting 
for slavery. We are fighting for independence. 
Say to Mr. Lincoln for me that I shall, at any 
time, be pleased to receive proposals for peace on 



68 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

the basis of our independence. It will be useless 
to approach me with any other." And on a former 
occasion he had declared : "All we ask is to be let 
alone — that those who never held power over us 
shall not now attempt our subjugation by arms." 

Away, then, with the preposterous and malic- 
ious charge that the South went to war to perpet- 
uate and extend the institution of slavery ! Still, 
the cry went forth from the abolition press, and 
was accepted as truth by the uninformed masses 
of the European nations that the chief, if not the 
only business of Virginia gentlemen was the rais- 
ing of slaves, like cattle, to be sold to the more 
Southern markets. 

How Virginia loved the Union that she had done 
more than any other State to create ; how she cluni.'- 
to it to the last and labored to preserve it until 
"the last argument was exhausted" is now so well 
known to the world that it would be superfluous to 
revert to it, but for the purpose of putting the 
facts in condensed and convenient form into the 
hands of our children and children's chiklren to 
the end that they may imbibe with the rudiments 
of their education the great truths of the grand 
and noble struggle their fathers made to "trans- 
mit unshorn" to them the priceless rights of self- 
government handed down to us and them by their 
forefathers of the Revolution. 

The historian, Rhodes, says: "Virginia, whose 
share in forming the Union had been greater than 
that of any other one State, was loath to see that 
great work shattered, and now made a supreme 
effort to save it."' 



illistory United States. Rhodes, Vol. Ill, p. 290. 



CHAPTER VII, 



On the 7th of January, 1861, after South Caro- 
lina had seceded, and it was evident all the Cotton 
States, unless prompt measures were taken to 
effect a compromise, would soon follow her ex- 
ample, the Legislature of Virginia was called in 
extra session. In his message to that body Gov- 
ernor Letcher, after plainly and fully setting forth 
and explaining the dangerous and perplexing 
problems confronting the State and the country, 
said : "The condition of our country at this time 
excites the most serious fears for the perpetuation 
of the Union, Surely, no people have been blessed 
as we have been, and it is melancholy to think that 
all is now about to be sacrificed on the altar of pas- 
sion. If the judgments of men were consulted, if 
the admonitions of their consciences were respect- 
ed, the Union would yet be saved from over- 
throw,"^ But while giving expression to his deep 
devotion to the Union, he did not fail to declare in 
unmistakable terms his belief in the right of seces- 
sion. He reviewed fully and dispassionately the 
persistent action of the abolition element of the 
North, which, for two generations, had been un- 
compromising and unceasing in their assaults on 
the Constitutional rights of the South upon ques- 
tions relating to slavery and State Government, 
He discouraged the plan of calling a State Con- 
vention, and proposed instead that Commissioners 
be sent to the Legislatures of the several Northern 

ijournal of Virginia House of Delegates, 1861. 



70 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

States that had enacted laws repugnant to the 
rights guaranteed by the Federal Constitution, and 
to request and urge their repeal, and that similar 
messengers be, also, dispatched to the Legislatures 
of the slaveholding States to inquire and ascertain 
the exact character and requirements of the de- 
mands and guarantees they deemed necessary to 
protect their rights and interests under the Con- 
stitution. Following the spirit, but modifying the 
plan proposed by the Governor, the General As- 
sembly adopted resolutions inviting all such States 
of the Union "as are willing to unite with Vir- 
ginia in an earnest effort to adjust the present un- 
happy controversies to appoint commissioners to 
meet on the Fourth day of February, 1861, in the 
City of Washington, similar Commissioners ap- 
pointed by Virginia.'" The same resolutions also 
provided for the appointment of a Commissioner 
to the President of the United States, and another 
Commissioner to South Carolina, and such other 
States as may have seceded in the meantime, to 
urge and entreat them to abstain from any further 
action such as might produce a conflict of arms 
between the seceding States and the Government 
of the United States pending the action of the 
proposed Peace Commissioners. 

The preamble to the resolutions providing for 
the Peace Conference declared that: "Whereas, 
it is the deliberate opinion of the General As- 
sembly of Virginia that, unless the unhappy con- 
troversy that now divides the States of this Con- 
federacy shall be satisfactorily adjusted, a perma- 

ijournal of House of Delegates, Extra Session 1861. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 71 

nent dissolution of the Union is inevitable, and the 
General Assembly is desirous of employing every 
reasonable means to avert so dire a calamity."^ 

But, echoing the sentiment expressed in the 
Governor's message, both Houses of the General 
Assembly, with practical unanimity, adopted reso- 
lutions declaring that the Government of a Union 
formed by the consent of all the States had no 
right to make war upon any of its members, and 
with regard to the States which had already seced- 
ed, or might secede, *'We are unalterably opposed 
to any attempt on the part of the Federal Gov- 
ernment to coerce the same into reunion or sub- 
mission, and that we will resist the same by all 
means in our power." 

Twenty States responded to Virginia's call and 
sent representatives to the Peace Conference 
which met in Washington on February 4, 1861. 
Rhodes says in the third volume of his History of 
the United States : "The historical significance of 
the Peace Convention consists in the evidence it 
affords of the attachment of the Border Slave 
States to the Union." The spirit of love and ven- 
eration for the Government established by our 
ancestors, and our deep yearning for the restora- 
tion of peace and amicable relations between the 
sections were beautifully and feelingly expressed 
in the utterances and declarations and appeals 
made by Virginia's representatives. Ex-President 
John Tyler, who was chosen to preside over the 
deliberations of the Conference, said in his address 
on assuming the chair: "The voice of Virginia 

ijournal House of Delegates, Extra Session 1861. 



72 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

has invited her co-states to meet her in counsel. 
In the initiation of this Government that same 
voice was heard and complied with, and the result- 
ing seventy-odd years have fully attested the wis- 
dom of the decision then adopted. Our god-like 
fathers created ! We have to preserve. They 
built up through their wisdom and patriotism 
monuments which have eternized their names. 
You have before you, gentlemen, a task equally 
grand, equally sublime, and quite as full of glory 
and immortality; you have to snatch from ruin 
a grand and glorious Confederation, to preserve 
the Government and to renew and invigorate the 
Constitution.'" Hon. William C. Rives, ex-United 
States Senator and once Minister to France, said: 
"Mr. President, something must be done to save 
the country, to relieve these apprehensions, and to 
restore a broken confidence. Virginia steps in 
to arrest the country in its progress to ruin. Sir, 
I have had some experience in revolutions in an- 
other hemisphere, in revolutions produced by the 
same causes that are now operating among us. 
I have seen the pavements of Paris covered and 
the gutters running with fraternal blood. God 
forbid I should see this horrid picture repeated in 
my own country — and yet it will be. Sir, if we 
listen to the counsel urged here."- 

Mr. George W. Summers, another of Virginia's 
representative sons, commenced his speech with 
an emotion too deep for utterance: "Mr. Presi- 
dent, my heart is full ! I cannot approach the 

'Journal of Peace Convention, p. 14. 
-Journal of Peace Convention, p. 135. 




THE PERRY PICTURES. 
BOSTON EDITION. 



COPYRIGHT, 1801, BY M. P. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 73 

great issues with which we are dealing with be- 
coming coolness and deliberation ! Sir ! I love this 
Union. The man does not live who entertains a 
higher respect for this Government than I do. 
I know its history — I know how it was established. 
There is not an incident in its history that is not 
precious to me. I do not wish to survive its dis- 
solution."^ 

But all was unavailing. The destructive ele- 
ment in all the Northern States which sent dele- 
gates to the Conference had seen to it that none 
should be sent but those who were pledged to carry 
out the predetermined plan of the fanatical war 
party ; or if any patriotic and reasonable men were 
sent, as some undoubtedly were, they should be in 
such a minority as to be easily voted down, over- 
ruled and ignored. And thus all reason, every 
argument and every pathetic appeal for peace and 
reconciliation were met by cold disdain, sneering 
rebuff or positive insult. A single incident will 
suffice to show the spirit in which all of Virginia's 
advances and overtures for peace and amity were 
met. Senator Chandler, of Michigan, familiarly 
referred to as "Old Zack Chandler," and who dur- 
ing the years of blood and horror that followed, 
succeeded by the darker days of Reconstruction, 
became known to fame, or infamy as "The Great 
Michigander," wrote to the Governor of his State : 
"Dear Governor, Bingham and myself telegraphed 
you on Saturday, at the request of Massachusetts 
and New York, to send delegates to the Peace or 
Compromise Congress. They admit now that we 

ijournal of Peace Convention, p. 15. 



74 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

were right and they were wrong; that no Republi- 
can State should have sent delegates; but they are 
here now and cannot get away. The whole thing 
was gotten up against my judgment and advice, 
and will end in thin smoke. Some of the manu- 
facturing States think that a fight would be awful. 
Without a little bloodletting this Union will not, 
in my estimation, be worth a curse.'" 

And that was the spirit that dominated the rul- 
ing faction of the Northern people, and drove the 
conservative element before it with a whip of 
scorpions. The Black Republican party was fully 
bent and determined on war, and nothing but war 
and "bloodletting" would satisfy it. 

Thus the deliberations of the Peace Conference 
came to naught, and the great and vital objects for 
which the people of Virginia had called their coun- 
trymen to counsel were met and checkmated, and 
doomed to go down in history as unachieved and 
overthrown by a wild and reckless spirit of un- 
reasoning fanaticism. 

ijournal of Peace Convention, 1861, p. 461; Logic of History, p. 138. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



The General Assembly of Virginia, which pro- 
posed and brought about the Peace Conference, 
also adopted a resolution providing for the calling 
of a State Convention to consider and take suit- 
able action on the great problems of the hour, and 
the dangers that menaced and threatened the peace 
and the very existence of the State and the Union. 
This body became known in history as "The Seces- 
sion Convention," a misnomer, as is shown by 
the fact that it was called as a last resort to find 
honorable means, if possible, to avoid seces'sion. 

So careful were the movers and promoters of 
the call to guard against the danger and possibili- 
ty of an irresponsible body of m^n clothed with 
untrammeled power carrying the State out of the 
Union under the promptings of the wild excite- 
ment and passion that were sweeping over the 
country and shaking the Government from its 
foundations, that it was provided in the act that 
the people of Virginia, in selecting delegates to the 
Convention, should declare, by a separate vote, 
whether or not the action of that body should be 
referred back to the people for ratification or re- 
jection, thus jealously reserving to the people the 
right and power to go to the polls and calmly de- 
cide whether or not the State should withdraw 
from the Union. 

It was a moment pregnant with the most mo- 
mentous and farreaching consequences to the State 
and the country at large. Seven States had al- 



76 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

ready seceded, and the remaining seven of the 
Southern group, with anxious eyes fixed on Vir- 
ginia, were waiting to see what action would be 
taken by the old Mother of States and Statesmen, 
hoping thereby to shape their own for the ultimate 
good of all. Had Virginia at that moment taken 
the final step and seceded she would undoubtedly 
have been followed in quick succession by North 
Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, Ken- 
tucky and Maryland, as was done by the first three 
named when she did finally withdraw. 

The commanding and determining influence of 
Virginia in the great questions of the hour was as 
well recognized and understood in the North as 
elsewhere. William H. Seward wrote from Wash- 
ington : "The election in Virginia tomorrow prob- 
ably determines whether all the Slave States will 
take the attitude of disunion. Everybody around 
me thinks that that will make the separation ir- 
retrievable and involve us in a flagrant Civil 
War.'" 

Charles Francis Adams has described the in- 
tense interest centered on the Virginia election 
thus : 'T well remember that day — gray, overcast, 
wintry — which succeeded the Virginia election. 
Then living in Boston, a young man of twenty- 
five, I shared — as who did not — in the common 
deep depression and intense anxiety. Virginia 
speaking against secession had emitted no uncer- 
tain sound. It was as if a weight had been taken 
off the mind of every one,"-' 

*Lcc at Appomattox, C. K. Adams, p. 403. 
-Lee at Appomattox, Clias. F. Adams, p. 402. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 77 

The election for delegates to the Convention was 
held on February 4, 1861. Never before had the 
people of Virginia — the undivided, unpartitioned 
Old Dominion, before the hand of the destroyer 
had been laid upon her fair domain with an atroci- 
ty as black as that laid upon dismembered Poland, 
— never before had her people been summoned to 
an election so fraught with such fateful import- 
ance to the State and the Union. Stirred by the 
fervor of the campaign and the magnitude of the 
issues at stake, around the polls that day "the 
grower of wheat from the banks of the Potomac 
met the planter of tobacco from the distant Roa- 
noke, and the tiller of corn who greets the first 
beams of the morning sun from the golden waves 
of the broad Atlantic, hailed his brother who 
catches his last parting ray as reflected from the 
glassy bosom of the beautiful Ohio." 

A quiet, law-abiding, agricultural people, deep- 
ly devoted to their State and the Union, and plead- 
ing only for peace! 

The State was divided into a hundred and fifty- 
two election districts. The candidates presenting 
themselves for the suffrages of the people were 
ranged in three classes — unconditional Secession- 
ists, unconditional Union Men and Compromise 
men, that is, men opposed to secession and in 
favor of the Union provided the Federal authori- 
ties did not resort to armed coercion to bring back 
the States already seceded. 

The returns from the polls showed that of the 
delegates elected to the Convention the men of the 
second and third classes were in an overwhelming 



78 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

majority. On the question of submitting the work 
of the Convention to the people for ratification or 
rejection the vote stood 100,536 for submission 
and 45,161 against it, thus declaring to the world 
that "on the issues as then made up" Virginia 
refused to secede. Charles Francis Adams, in his 
book "Lee at Appomattox," says : "Thus be it 
always remembered, Virginia did not take her 
place in the Secession movement because of the 
election of an antislavery President. She did not 
raise her hand against the National Government 
from mere love of any peculiar institution, or a 
wish to protect or perpetuate it. The ground of 
her final action was of wholly another nature, and 
of a nature far more creditable."' 

The Convention met in the Hall of the House 
of Delegates on February 13, 1861. The vener- 
able John Janney, a Union man, was chosen to pre- 
side over its deliberations. His election was se- 
cured by the harmonious action of the different 
shades of Union sentiment and feeling which dom- 
inated the body. On taking the chair the Presi- 
dent said : "It is now seventy-three years since 
a Convention of the people of Virginia were as- 
sembled in this Hall to ratify the Constitution of 
the United States, one of the chief objects of which 
was to consolidate — not the Government. — but the 
Union of the States. Causes which have passed 
and are daily passing into history which will set 
its seal upon them, have brought the Constitu- 
tion and the Union into imminent peril, and Vir- 
ginia has come to the rescue. It is what the whole 

^Lce at Appomattox, p. 40J. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 79 

country expected of her. Gentlemen, there is a 
flag which, for nearly a century, has been borne in 
triumph through the battle and the breeze, and 
now floats over this Capitol, on which there is a 
star representing this ancient Commonwealth, and 
my earnest prayer, in which I know every mem- 
ber of this body will unite, is that it may remain 
there forever, provided, always, that its lustre is 
untarnished."^ 

Thus was sounded the keynote of the patriotic 
spirit with which Virginia approached and at- 
tempted to solve, for the good of all, the moment- 
ous problems that confronted her and the country ; 
and from that day until the 17th of April the op- 
posing forces of Secession and Union faced each 
other in ardent and earnest debate. 

It at once became apparent that the strongest, 
if not the controlling, force in shaping the final 
action of the Convention would be the policy 
adopted by the newly elected Federal Administra- 
tion towards the already seceded States. Vir- 
ginia, in the recent election, had spoken with no 
uncertain voice against secession ; but six Gulf 
States, with South Carolina at their head, had al- 
ready seceded and organized a Confederacy with 
its Government established at Montgomery; and 
Virginia would never consent to, or aid in, the 
unrighteous and unconstitutional attempt to sub- 
jugate and coerce these States by force of arms. 
Thus it became a question, not of slavery, nor of 
the wisdom of secession, but of the right and 
power of the Federal Government under the Con- 

ijournal of the Convention, 1861, p. 8. 



80 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

stitution to coerce a sovereign State which had 
merely exercised her undeniable and, until now, 
unquestioned right to resume the powers by her 
voluntarily delegated to that Government. 

President Buchanan had submitted to Congress 
the question of dealing with the seceding States, 
but Congress had taken no action nor expressed 
officially any purpose or plan of doing so. 

Thus all eyes were turned upon the incoming 
President, who, as we have already seen, was 
elected on a platform inspired by that "Abolition- 
ism in the North, which, trained in the school of 
Garrison and Phillips, and affecting to regard the 
Constitution as 'A league with Hell and a covenant 
with Death' had, with steady and untiring hate, 
sought a disruption of the Union as the best and 
surest means for the accomplishment of the aboli- 
tion of slavery in the Southern States.'" 

The country stood with bated breath, and the 
supreme question of the hour was what policy will 
he adopt, what line of action will he follow with 
regard to the seceded States : Stephen A. Doug- 
las, the defeated candidate of the Northern wing 
of the Democratic party, writing of the Republi- 
can conspirators, the leaders of the Lincoln party, 
said in a letter dated February 2, 1861: "They 
are bold, determined men. They are striving to 
break up the Union under the pretense of preserv- 
ing it. They are struggling to overthrow the Con- 
stitution, while professing undying attachment to 
it and a willingness to make any sacrifice to main- 
tain it. They are trying to plunge the country 

iSpcccli of C'VQ. \V. Brent in tlie N'irginia Convention, Mar. 8, 1861, 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 81 

into a cruel war as the surest means of destroying 
the Union upon the plea of enforcing the laws and 
protecting public property." 

Such monumental duplicity and hypocrisy could 
not be better exemplified than in the blatant utter- 
ances and subsequent actions of the abolition 
shriekers who had not then been initiated into the 
underground workings of the real Republican lead- 
ers and conspirators with William H. Seward at 
their head. 

After Lincoln was elected and the Gulf States 
were threatening to follow South Carolina in with- 
drawing from the Union, Wendell Phillips, the 
great High Priest of New England disunionism, 
denouncing Lincoln as "a huckster in politics," 
and "a slavehound from Illinois" and, condemning 
the war he proposed to wage against the seceding 
States, said : "Here are a series of States girding 
the Gulf which think they should have an inde- 
pendent government; they have a right to decide 
that question without appealing to you or to me. 
Standing with the principles of '76 behind us, who 
can deny them that right? Abraham Lincoln has 
no right to a soldier in Fort Sumter." And after 
those States seceded, he cried frantically in an- 
other speech : "I have labored for nineteen years 
to dissolve the Union, and now success has come 
at last. Let the South go ! Let her go with flags 
flying and trumpets blowing ! Give her her forts, 
her arsenals and her sub-treasuries! Speed the 
parting guest ! All hail disunion ! Beautiful on 
the mountains are the feet of them who bring the 
glad tidings of disunion."^ 

^Speeches, Lectures and Letters, Wendell Phillips, 



82 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

And yet, after Lincoln and Seward had "let slip 
the dogs of war" this same Phillips, and his fol- 
lowers were loudest and bitterest in hurling at 
the South the epithets of "Rebel" and "Traitor." 

No man who saw as did the writer, though a 
boy, the birth of the Republican party ; and no 
man or woman who has watched its workings and 
followed its history can doubt for a moment that, 
from the day of its organization in 1854 to the 
hour Fort Sumter was fired on. Republicans had 
striven might and main to dissolve the Union. 
Not a man in the party, as at first organized, re- 
spected the Flag. Both the Flag and the Union 
were scorned and hated by the Republicans of the 
antebellum regime. The New York Tribune, an 
acknowledged organ of the Black Republican 
party, habitually adorned its columns with such 
irreverent and disgusting doggerel as this : 

"Tear down the flaunting lie, 
Half-mast the starry flag, j 

Insult no sunny, sky 
With hate's polluted rag." 

For what purpose, and by what means these 
original Union haters and Flag insulters were led 
to turn a complete summersault and launch 
against the retiring South all the avalanche of 
long-standing hate and venom they had formerly 
heaped upon the Union and the Flag will be re- 
vealed by an examination of their own party reC' 
prds and correspondence. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 83 

After leaving his family in Philadelphia and in 
disguise entering Washington in the night, Abra- 
ham Lincoln was inaugurated President of the 
United States on the 4th of March, 1861. His 
inaugural address, which was eagerly waited for 
in the hope that it would reveal the policy of the 
incoming Administration, and thus relieve the 
strain of uncertainty and suspense under which 
the country labored, and set at rest the fears of 
the South awakened by the bitterness and violence 
of the Presidential campaign, was couched in such 
ambiguous language and expressed in terms of 
such studied and artful evasion that the public 
mind was left in as great a state of uncertainty 
and perplexitj^ as before. 

On the one hand, in what appeared to be plain 
and unmistakable language, he gave assurance 
that the Federal Government would respect the 
rights of States and individuals in regard to 
slavery, and that no interest or section would be 
disturbed in any Constitutional right ; while on the 
other hand, his utterances and outgivings on the 
great question of his policy in regard to the coer- 
cion of the seceded States were so evasive and un- 
certain as to be plainly susceptible of different 
and opposite constructions. 

In this atmosphere of uncertainty and suspense 
the Virginia Convention continued for nearly six 
weeks to wrestle with the opposing questions of 
Union and secession. Meanwhile, the Government 
at Washington had done nothing, and it was a fact 
fully recognized and understood that the Presi- 
dent was as a lump of potter's clay in the hands of 



84 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

the shrewd and able conspirators by whom he was 
surrounded. 

The great body of the Northern people, as all 
the records plainly show, were averse and opposed 
to making war on the South on the question of 
slavery. A new issue, then, must be found or in- 
vented on which the country could be dragged into 
a bloody and destructive war. Nearly a month 
had passed and not a step had been taken in that 
direction. But tremendous and bloody schemes 
were brooding in the brain of William H. Seward, 
who, as Secretary of State, was recognized as the 
moving spirit and brains of the Administration. 

About the first of April, to spur Lincoln into 
action, Seward wrote a carefully prepared paper 
entitled "Some Thoughts for the President's Con- 
sideration." In this paper Seward said : "We 
are at the end of a month's administration and yet 
without a policy. This, however, is not culpable, 
it has been unavoidable. But further delay to 
adopt and prosecute our policy, for both domestic 
and foreign affairs, would not only bring scandal 
on the Administration, but danger on the country. 
For the policy at home, my system is built on this 
idea as a ruling one: That we must change the 
question before the public from one upon slavery, 
or about slavery, to a question of Union or Dis- 
union. In other words, from what would be re- 
garded as a party question to one of Patriotism 
or Union. The occupation and evacuation of Fort 
Sumter, although not in fact a slavery or party 
question, is so regarded. Witness the temper 
manifested by the Republicans of the Northern 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 85 

States and the Union men of the South. For the 
rest, I would simultaneously defend and reinforce 
all the forts in the Gulf and have the Navy recalled 
from foreign stations to be prepared for a block- 
ade. Put the island of Key West under Martial 
Law. I would maintain every fort and Federal 
possession in the South. This will raise distinctly 
the question of Union or Disunion."' This letter 
was intended for Lincoln's eye only, and was never 
laid before the Cabinet as far as the records show. 
Lincoln kept the matter to himself, but followed 
the shrewd and cunning advice given, to drop his 
party's darling issue of slavery and, in its place, 
raise the cry of "Save the Union." Both Lincoln 
and Seward were creatures of the Republican 
party, put in office by Black Republican votes, and 
yet, at the very outset of their official career, they 
spurned their party's most cherished issue, slav- 
ery, and put in its place the Union and the Flag, 
both of which their party had always despised 
and hated and denounced and abused from a thous- 
and rostrums. 

Soon after the organization of the Virginia 
Convention a Committee on Federal Relations con- 
sisting of twenty-one members was appointed, to 
which should be referred without debate all mem- 
orial proposals relating to the secession of the 
State. On the 16th of March the report of that 
Committee was taken up for consideration by the 
Convention. The majority report, signed by two- 
thirds of the members, described and deplored the 
"present distracted condition of the country" and 

iHistory of the Great Civil War, Facts and Falsehoods, pp. 154-5. 



86 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

earnestly prayed that "An adjustment may be 
reached by which the Union may be preserved in 
its integrity; and peace, prosperity and fraternal 
feeling be restored throughout the land," An- 
other section declared that: "The people of Vir- 
ginia recognize the American principle that gov- 
ernment is founded on the consent of the gov- 
erned, and they will never consent that the Fed- 
eral power, which is in part their power, shall be 
exerted for the purpose of subjugating the people 
of the seceded States to the Federal authority.'" 

The minority report provided for the immediate 
secession of Virginia. This was defeated by a 
recorded vote of forty-five "yeas" to eighty-nine 
"nays." The majority section was adopted by a 
vote of one hundred and four "yeas" to thirty-one 
"nays." 

Thus, while Virginia, through her duly elected 
representatives in Convention assembled, was de- 
termined to cling to the Union with an undying 
devotion as long as that could be done with honor 
to herself and justice to the South, yet she, and 
the country at large, were left utterly in doubt 
and perplexity by the inaction of the PYderal Ad- 
ministration and the ambiguous language and 
veiled expressions of the President's inaugural 
address. This general state of uncertainty was 
expressed by ex-President Buchanan in a letter 
dated March 16, 1861, in which he said: "Every 
day affords proof of the absence of any settled 
policy or harmonious concert of action in the ad- 
ministration. Seward, Bates and Cameron form 

ijournal of Virginia Convt-ntion, 1861, pp. 31-43. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 87 

one wing; Chase, Wells, Blair the opposite wing; 
Smith is on both sides, and Lincoln sometimes on 
one, sometimes on the other. There has been 
agreement in nothing.' 

In this aspect of the situation the Virginia Con- 
vention determined to send Commissioners to 
Washington for the purpose of ascertaining at first 
hand what action, if any, President Lincoln in- 
tended to take in regard to the seceded States and 
to that end the following resolution was adopted 
on the 8th of April: "Whereas in the opinion 
of this Convention the uncertainty which prevails 
in the public mind as to the policy which the Fed- 
eral Executive intends to pursue towards the se- 
ceded States is extremely injurious to the indus- 
trial and commercial interests of the country, 
tends to keep up an excitement which is unfavor- 
able to the adjustment of pending difficulties, and 
threatens a disturbance of the public peace, there- 
fore, 

"Resolved, That a committee of three delegates 
be appointed by this Convention to wait upon the 
President of the United States, and present to 
him this Preamble and Resolutions and respect- 
fully ask him to communicate to this Convention 
the policy which the Federal Executive intends to 
pursue in regard to the Confederate States.'" 

The double dealing, duplicity and deceit wilfully 
and persistently practiced by Lincoln and Seward 
in their pretended negotiations with this Commit- 
tee and, also, with the Commissioners sent by the 

iLife of James Buchanan, Vol. II, p. 34. 
2Journal of Virginia Convention, p. 143. 



88 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

Confederate Government to negotiate a peaceable 
settlement of all matters connected with the Forts 
and other United States property situated within 
the seceded States, will go down in history as a 
blot on the diplomacy of a government claiming 
to be civilized and enlightened. 

The Committee appointed by the Virginia Con- 
vention consisted of William B. Preston, A. H. H. 
Stuart and George W. Randolph. The results of 
that commission are detailed by Mr. Stuart in the 
first volume of Southern Historical Society papers. 
On page 452 he says : "I remember that Lincoln 
used this homely expression : 'If I recognize the 
Southern Confederacy what will become of my 
revenue? I might as well shut up housekeeping at 
once.' " Still, Mr. Stuart, assures the world that 
"his declarations were distinctly pacific, and he 
expressly disclaimed all purpose of war." 

Secretary of State Seward and Attorney Gen- 
eral Bates, in all their meetings and discussions 
with the Virginia Committee, were equally out- 
spoken and apparently sincere in their assurances 
of peace and the amicable views and intentions of 
the Administration. At the same moment Lin- 
coln's proclamation calling for an army of seventy- 
five thousand men to subjugate and coerce the 
Southern States had been written, and was al- 
ready in print; and the same train that brought 
the Committee back to Richmond elated with the 
thought of reporting to the Convention the cordial 
expressions and pacific intentions, as they thought, 
of the PVdoral Executive, also brought Lincoln's 
proclamation, calling on the Governor of Virginia 





THE PERRY PICTURES. 
BOSTON EDITION. 



ROBERT E. LEE. 

1807-1870 



COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY EUGENE A. PERRY. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 89 

to furnish her quota of the army intended to over- 
throw and destroy the last vestige of the Consti- 
tutional rights of the States. 

Mr. Stuart continues : "This proclamation was 
carefully withheld from us and we knew nothing 
of it until Monday morning when it appeared in 
the Richmond papers. When I saw it at break- 
fast I thought it was a mischievous hoax, for I 
could not believe Lincoln guilty of such duplic- 
ity."' 

And the same course of deception and chicanery 
was followed by Lincoln and his advisers in their 
dealings with the Commissioners which, as before 
noted, were sent to Washington by the Confeder- 
ate Government, as soon as that Government was 
organized, to bring about an amicable and "speedy 
adjustment of all questions growing out of the 
political separation upon such terms as the re- 
spective interests, geographical contiguity and 
future welfare of the two nations may render 
necessary." 

President Lincoln, while refusing to recognize 
the Confederacy by treating with those Commis- 
sioners as the representatives of an independent 
government, nevertheless, entered into semi-of- 
ficial negotiations with them upon the questions 
at issue. During these pretended "negotiations" 
the Confederate Commissioners were kept in 
Washington week after week, deceived by verbal 
promises and misleading hopes of securing in the 
end a peaceable and satisfactory adjustment and 
settlement of all the complicated interests and 

iSouthern Historical Society's Papers, p. 452. 



90 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

claims arising out of the separation of the sec- 
tions. The Commissioners were blandly exhorted 
to be patient and trustful, and were distinctly 
promised by Lincoln and Seward, through Judge 
Campbell, of the Supreme Court of the United 
States, that no attempt would be made to pro- 
vision or reinforce Fort Sumter, and that the 
garrison should be withdrawn and the Fort evac- 
uated as soon as the necessary arrangements could 
be made; the Commissioners, on their part, agree- 
ing that, while such arrangements were in pro- 
gress, the soldiers of the garrison should have 
access to the markets of Charleston to secure 
necessary provisions. 

And during all this time Lincoln and Seward 
were secretly planning, organizing, arming and 
provisioning one of the most stupendous war Meets 
ever assembled in American waters to make a 
sudden descent on Sumter and, thus, inaugurate 
the most destructive and devastating war of mod- 
ern times. This deception was kept up almost to 
the last moment, and as the mock negotiations 
dragged on from day to day and no move was 
made towards the promised evacuation of Fort 
Sumter, uneasiness began to be felt by the Com- 
missioners and the Government for which they 
were acting, and Judge Campbell read to Mr. 
Seward a letter which he had written to President 
Davis setting forth in detail the agreement en- 
tered into by Lincoln and the Southern Commis- 
sioners. Seward, pointing to the letter in Judge 
Caniplx'U's hand, said: "Before that letter reaches 
its destination Fort Sumter will be evacuated." 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 91 

At that very moment his gigantic preparations 
to reinforce Sumter were nearing completion ! 

Still, the days dragged on and grew into weeks 
and the Fort was not evacuated. Finally, Judge 
Campbell, urged by the Commissioners who were 
losing all faith in such promises, and all patience 
with such dilatory performances, wrote Seward 
a letter of inquiry and remonstrance. The wiley 
and unscrupulous Secretary telegraphed his an- 
swer in a single laconic sentence : "Faith as to 
Sumter fully kept — wait and see." 

Six days after that astounding assurance was 
sent the great "Relief Squadron, with eleven ships 
carrying two hundred and eighty-five guns and 
two thousand four hundred men, was sent out 
from New York and Norfolk with orders from 
the authorities at Washington to reinforce Fort 
Sumter, peacefully, if permitted, but forcibly if 
they resist.'" 

It is amply proven by unquestioned public 
records and published "Speeches, Letters and 
State Papers,"- that five of the seven members of 
Lincoln's Cabinet were opposed to the expedition 
to reinforce Fort Sumter, and advised against it. 
Even William H. Seward, the closest, ablest and 
most unscrupulous of his advisers, declared in a 
letter addressed to the President that, by the at- 
tempt, "We will have inaugurated a civil war by 
our own act without adequate object, after which 
reunion will be hopeless, at least, under this Ad- 
ministration, or in any other way than by a pop- 

iThe War Between the States, Alex Stephens. 
-Life of Lincoln, Nicolay & Hay, Vol. II. 



92 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

ular disavowal, both of the war and of the Admin- 
istration which unnecessarily commenced it," 
Thus did this wiley conspirator conceal, not only 
from his colleagues in the Cabinet, but, as it 
seems, from the President himself, his real ob- 
ject in fitting out the great expedition, which 
object will appear later. 

But Lincoln had fully determined on war and 
nothing could swerve or dissuade him from his 
purpose. After it was learned that the great 
Relief Squadron had actually sailed from New 
York and Norfolk, and was under way for Char- 
leston, General Beauregard, in order to prevent 
Fort Sumter being reinforced and provisioned, 
opened fire upon it on the morning of the 12th of 
April, 1861. The fire was returned by the fort 
and the cannonade was kept up through the day. 
At night the firing from the fort ceased, but was 
continued by General Beauregard through the 
night. On the following morning the fort re- 
sumed its cannonade, but soon it appeared that 
the Vv'orks and buildings were on fire, caused by 
the hot shot and shell thrown into it by the Con- 
federates. Major Anderson, in command, ran up 
a signal of distress, and General Beauregard im- 
mediately sent a boat offering to assist in putting 
out the fire, but before it reached the fort Major 
Anderson displayed a (lag of truce. 

And that is the whole story of the famous bom- 
bardment of Fort Sumter. Not a single man was 
killed on either side during the engagement. 
Afh'r Uu> surrendi'r of the fort, (Jeneral Beaure- 
gard permitted Major Anderson to salute the 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 93 

United States Hag with fifty guns and, in doing 
this, two of his guns burst and killed four men. 
It is an astonishing fact — so regarded at the time 
— that the Relief Squadron was in full view of 
the harbor long before the action terminated, and 
could easily have prevented the capitulation, yet 
not a gun was fired, or a movement made to sup- 
port or relieve Major Anderson and his small gar- 
rison. The real object of the expedition had been 
accomplished. The South had been driven and 
forced, in self defence, to "fire on the flag" and 
that act was instantly seized upon by the aboli- 
tion party, and adopted as the grand slogan with 
which to "fire the Northern heart." 

We have seen how, in a letter intended only for 
the President's eye, Seward had advised and im- 
pressed on Lincoln the necessity that "We must 
change the question before the public from one 
about slavery to a question of Union," and the 
Flag. It was the only issue on which they could 
stir the masses of the North and West to rush 
headlong into a destructive and unprovoked war 
upon the South. And we now see how successfully 
and perfectly that arch conspirator had worked 
out his diabolical scheme to force the South to 
strike a blow in defence of her rights at Char- 
leston. 

The news of the attack on Sumter was received 
with demonstrations of delight by the whole Abol- 
ition element of New England, and instantly went 
up the cry of "The Union" and "The Flag." Then 
began the work of "Working up the Northern 
mind" and "Firing the Northern heart." By con- 



94 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

cert of action the cry was shrieked and shouted 
everywhere throughout the North "The Fhig has 
been insulted," and "The Union is destroyed" and 
the very people who, for years beyond the memory 
of many then living, had labored to destroy the 
Union as "a mistake," "a crime" and "a league 
with Hell," and denounced the flag as "a flaunting 
lie" and "a polluted rag," were loudest in thunder- 
ing the new-found slogan: "Save the Union and 
Protect the Flag." 



CHAPTER IX. 



The action of Virginia was prompt and decisive. 
"The time had come when she must either level 
her guns on her Southern sisters or make her 
breast their shield." In reply to the demand for 
Virginia's quota of the seventy-five thousand men 
called for in the President's proclamation, Gov- 
ernor Letcher said : "I have only to say that the 
militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the 
powers at Washington for any such use or pur- 
pose, as they have in view. Your object is to sub- 
jugate the Southern States, and the requisition 
made upon me for such an object — in my judg- 
ment not within the purview of the Constitution 
or the Act of 1795 — will not be complied with. You 
have chosen to inaugurate Civil War ; and having 
done so we will meet you in a spirit as determined 
as the Administration has exhibited towards the 
South.'" Similar answers were returned by the 
Governors of North Carolina, Tennessee, Ken- 
tucky, Arkansas and Missouri, all of which States, 
as before said, were watching and waiting for, 
and were largely influenced by, the action of Vir- 
ginia. Governor Ellis, of North Carolina, though 
opposed to secession as Letcher of Virginia orig- 
inally was, telegraphed to Washington : "I can be 
no party to this wicked violation of the laws of 
this country, and especially to this war which is 
being waged upon a free and independent peo- 
ple." 

iGreeley's American Conflict, Vol. Ill, p. 86. 



96 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

Governor McGoffin, of Kentucky, wrote Lincoln 
that Kentucky would "furnish no troops for the 
wicked purpose of making war upon the States." 

Governor Jackson of Missouri replied: "Your 
requisition, in my judjjment, is illegal, unconsti- 
tutional and revolutionary, and its objects in- 
human and diabolical." 

On April 17th the Virginia Convention, by a 
vote of eighty-eight "ayes" to fifty-five "noes," 
adopted an Ordinance of Secession, to be sub- 
mitted to the people for ratification or rejection at 
a special election to be held on the 23rd of May. 
At that election the Ordinance of Secession was 
confirmed by a popular vote of 128,884 for, against 
o2,134 opposed. 

In the closing hours of the Convention "strong 
men spoke for or against secession with sorrow- 
ful hearts and voices trembling with emotion."' 
The late Mr. B. M. Munford in his admirable book, 
"Virginia's Attitude Toward Slavery and Seces- 
sion," says, "The action of the Convention was 
the logical and inevitable result of the President's 
proclamation. There had never been any doubt 
as to Virginia's position. With all her loyalty to 
the Union, she had repeatedly declared in the most 
authoritative manner her opposition to the coer- 
cion of the Cotton States and her determination 
to resist such a policy."- 

The English historian, Henderson, says: "So 
far Virginia had given no overt sign of sympathy 
with the Revolution. But she was now called upon 

1 Rhodes History Ignited Slates, Vol. Ill, p. 386. 

-Virginia's Attitude Toward Slavery and Secession, pp. 282. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 97 

to furnish her quota of regiments for the Federal 
Army. To have acceded to the demand would 
have been to abjure the most cherished principles 
of her political existence. Neutrality was im- 
possible. She was bound to furnish her tale of 
troops and thus belie her principles, or secede at 
once and reject, with a clean conscience, the Pres- 
ident's mandate. If the morality of secession may 
be questioned, if South Carolina acted with undue 
haste and without sufficient provocation, it can 
hardly be denied that the action of Virginia was 
not only fully justified, but beyond suspicion."^ 

In the Convention which framed the Constitu- 
tion of the United States a motion was made to 
give the Federal Government power to use mili- 
tary force against a non-complying State, but it 
was unanimously voted down and rejected and no 
such power was ever given the Federal Govern- 
ment by the Constitution. Lincoln, himself a law- 
yer, well knew that fact, and he sought an excuse 
for his unconstitutional action by raising an army 
to subjugate the South in the old "Act of 1795," 
referred to by Governor Letcher in his refusal to 
obey the mandate of the President's call for troops. 
That act was passed by Congress to enable the 
Federal Government to assist the State of Penn- 
sylvania in putting down what is known as the 
"Whiskey Rebellion" which was an insurrection 
against the authority of the State of Pennsyl- 
vania. 

President Buchanan defined the import and au- 
thority of that old act as follows : "Under the act 

^Henderson's "Stonewall Jackson," 



98 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

of 1795, the President is precluded from acting 
even upon his own personal and absolute knowl- 
edge of the existence of such an insurrection. Be- 
fore he can call forth the militia for its suppres- 
sion he must be first applied to for this purpose 
by the appropriate State Authorities in the man- 
ner prescribed by the Constitution.'" 

The raising of any army for such a purpose on 
such a flimsy pretext was not only illegal and un- 
constitutional but, in the eyes of all enlightened 
nations, supremely ridiculous. 

But in the gleeful language of one of his grovel- 
ing and obsequious admirers, "Abraham Lincoln 
kicked the Constitution into the cellar of the Cap- 
itol and there it remained innocuous until the war 
ended." 

Compare the high-handed and unauthorized 
crime of Abraham Lincoln in raising an army 
of seventy-five thousand men to resist and 
suppress the lawful acts of the Legislatures 
and Conventions of the people of sovereign 
and independent States with his previous opinions 
and public utterances. According to the Congres- 
sional Globe, first session Thirtieth Congress, p. 
94, Lincoln said on the floor of the House of 
Representatives : "Any people, anywhere, being 
inclined and having the power, have the right to 
rise up and shake off the existing government, and 
to form one that suits them better. This is a most 
valuable and most sacred right, a right which we 
hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is 
this right confined to cases in which the people 

iLifc of Buchanan. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 99 

of an existing government may choose to exercise 
it. Any portion of such people may revolutionize, 
putting down a minority intermingling or near 
them who oppose their movements."- "The South's 
secession fulfilled every requirement laid down by 
Lincoln. The South had the right and she ex- 
ercised it with dignity and decency. She did not 
rise up and shake off the Union Government in a 
turbulent manner, she quietly withdrew,"^ and 
only asked to be let alone. 

As we have already seen, the whole course of 
the Lincoln Administration for the first two 
months of its existence was intended to hoodwink 
and deceive the South and the conservative people 
of the North as to its real intentions; and it was 
only after Lincoln and Seward were ready to 
strike the first blow that they raised the cry 
against the South of "Rebel and Traitor." 

The monstrous, oft repeated and as oft refuted 
charge that the South made war upon the United 
States Government with intent and purpose to 
destroy the Union and perpetuate slavery is too 
stale and, withal, too foolish and absurd to merit 
serious reply or consideration, save for the pur- 
pose of keeping constantly before the eyes and 
minds of our children and children's children 
throughout succeeding generations the everlasting 
truths and undeniable facts of the real causes and 
outrages that forced their fathers and grand- 
fathers, reluctantly and sorrowfully, in pure and 
patriotic defence of the God-given and inalienable 

ipacts and Falsehoods, p. 149. 

^Congressional Globe, Tnirtieth Congress, p. 94. 



100 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

rights bequeathed to them by their Revolutionary 
ancestors, to submit their cause to the arbitra- 
ment of the sword. War on the South was morally 
begun by the Abolitionists of New England forty 
years before the first gun was fired ; it was fully 
organized by the formation of the Black Republi- 
can Party in 1854 ; the first gun was fired by John 
Brown, the creature of that party, at Harper's 
Ferry in 1859; it was formally opened and de- 
clared by the sailing of the great war fleet against 
Charleston in 1861 ; and the first gun at Sumter 
was only the first gun of self-defense. 

"South Carolina had ceded the land on which 
Fort Sumter had been built to the General Gov- 
ernment for the protection of the harbor of Char- 
leston, and now that the fort was to be used, not 
for its original purpose but for the destruction 
of her beautiful city, the State, having lawfully 
and rightfully seceded from the Union, had the 
clear right to demand it back; and the Confed- 
erate authorities acted with rare patience and for- 
bearance when they waited so long in the vain 
hope of getting peaceable possession of their own. 
But when they received information that a power- 
ful armament was about to enter the harbor to 
reinforce P\)rt Sumter and make it impregnable 
to their assaults they, in opening fire upon the 
fort, "acted as strictly in self-defence as the man 
who uses whatever force may be necessary to dis- 
arm an assassin about to strike him instead of 
waiting to receive the fatal blow.'" 



JMcniorial N'oliimc of JcfTorsuii Davis, p. 308. 



CHAPTER X. 



CONCLUSION. 

Let us thus keep the undeniable facts and the 
undying truths of history constantly and always 
before our children and before the world, breath- 
ing the devout and perpetual prayer, 

"Lord God of Hosts, defend us yet, 
Lest we forget, lest we forget." 

And with those everlasting truths kept constantly 
before their eyes and instilled from infancy into 
their minds and hearts, let them be taught fear- 
lessly and proudly to proclaim, always and every- 
where, that their fathers need no defense and 
offer no apology for the course they pursued in 
the War between the States, steadfast in the 
eternal right and justice of their cause and as- 
sured that — 

No purer sword led braver band. 
Nor braver bled for a brighter land. 
Nor brighter land had a cause so grand 
Nor cause a chief like Lee. 

This sentiment was fittingly and aptly expressed 
by an incident at the Academy of Music in Rich- 
mond in which the late Hon. A. M. Keiley was the 
leading figure. Mayor Keiley, as he was famil- 
iarly and.aflfectionately known in Richmond, had 
been appointed by President Cleveland a Judge of 
the International Court and, in the discharge of 



102 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

his duties, was resident in Alexandria, Egypt, but 
was now on a visit to his old home in his native 
city. In presenting Judge Keiley to an audience 
of his friends and admirers who had packed the 
Academy to extend him a fitting welcome, the 
Chairman, among other compliments, spoke of 
him as "a Confederate soldier who gallantly 
fought for what he believed to be right." In com- 
mencing his address the distinguished speaker 
said: "I thank my friend for the many kind 
things he has said about me, but I must reject and 
deny one of his intended complimentary asser- 
tions. I did not fight for what I belie red to be 
right; I fought for what I knew was right;" and 
the thundering applause which drown^/d his fur- 
ther utterance showed how thoroughly in sym- 
pathy with the sentiment his audience was. 

So let it be proclaimed and maintained in the 
face of all opposition and dispute that we went 
to war and fought, as never people did, for a 
cause we kneiv and still know was right and just, 
and laid down our arms only when "forced to 
yield to overwhelming numbers and resources." 

The sacred and urgent duty that rests upon us 
to record and treasure up and transmit to our 
children and, through them to the remotest gen- 
erations of our posterity, the whole Truth, un- 
biased and unperverted in its entirety, of the 
noble fight their fathers made for liberty and Con- 
stitutional rights was earnestly set forth by 
Lieutenant Governor J. Taylor Ellyson in a speech 
before the United Confederate Veterans during 
the funeral obsequies of President Jefferson Davis 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 103 

at New Orleans in 1889. Mr. Ellyson said: 
"There is no danger that we who fought under 
the Stars and Bars, shall ever forget the memories 
of four stormy years or prove false to the gener- 
ous motives that then animated our lives; but 
there is danger, and real danger, that our children 
may be taught that the cause for which we fought 
was treason and we but traitors. From such a 
fate may a kind Providence spare us ! Then let us 
see that histories are written which shall contain 
the true story of Southern patriotism and valor, 
and which teach our children that the soldiers of 
the Southern Confederacy were not rebels, but 
were Americans who loved Constitutional liberty 
as something dearer than life itself. Let us be 
certain that our children know that the War be- 
tween the States was not a contest for the preser- 
vation of slavery, as some would have them be- 
lieve, but that it was a great struggle for the 
maintenance of Constitutional rights, and that the 
men who fought — 

Were warriors tried and true, 

Who bore the Flag of a nation's trust; 

And fell in a cause though lost, still just, 

And died for me and you."^ 
Nor was the cause for which we fought entirely 
"lost," 

"Truth crushed to earth will rise again." 
Though we failed to establish permanently an in- 
dependent government, yet, the eternal truth and 
right and justice of our cause still lives; and that 
it is steadily gaining ground in the minds and 

iMemorial Volume of Jefferson Davis, p. 584. 



104 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

convictions of calm, dispassionate thinkers every- 
where is shown by the fact, among many other 
instances, that one of the most distinguished and 
forceful writers of Massachusetts said in a recent 
publication, treating of the Confederacy and its 
people: "Such character and achievement were 
not all in vain ; though the Confederacy fell as an 
actual, physical Power, it lives eternally in its 
just cause — the cause of Constitutional liberty." 
And that the devotion and fortitude of our 
people, the enlightened and liberty-loving prin- 
ciples upon which our Government was founded 
and its administration conceived and executed, the 
high plane of civilized and humane warfare on 
which our campaigns were conducted and the un- 
surpassed courage and valor with which our bat- 
tles were fought are fully known and recognized 
in foreign lands is beautifully exemplified in the 
following touching incident. Professor Philip 
Stanley Worsley, of Oxford University, England, 
sent a copy of his translation of Homer's Hiad to 
General Robert E. Lee, who was then President 
of Washington College. On the fly leaf the author 
addressed General Lee as *'The most stainless of 
living commanders and except in fortune, the 
greatest," and adds an original poem in which 
he says: 

"Thy Troy is fallen, thy dear land 
Is marred beneath the spoiler's heel — 

>K * * * « * 

Ah, realm of tombs! Kut let her bear 
This blazon to the last of times: 
No nation rose so white and fair, 
Nor fell so pure of crimes." 




THE PERRY PICTURES. 129. 
BOSTON EDITION. 



COPYRIGHT, 1898. BY M. P. rice. 



U LYSSES S. GRANT 



Bibliography 



Books, Pamphlets, Papers and Manuscripts 
consulted and quoted in the preparation of the 
foregoing pages : 

The Olive Branch, Matthew Gary. 

The Pelham Papers, Hartford Courant, 1795. 

Boston Gazette, 1813. 

American Commonwealths, Scudder. 

Epochs in American History, Prof. Hart. 

History of the Hartford Convention, Dwight. 

Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Ford. 

Select Documents, McDonald. 

Journal of Virginia House of Burgesses. 

History of the United States, Bancroft. 

Critical Period of American History, Fisk. 

History of the great Civil War, Horton. 

William Lloyd Garrison, His Children. 

Wendell Phillips, Speeches, Lectures and Let- 
ters. 

Congressional Globe. 

The Men Who Saved the Union, Donn Piatt. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Speeches, Lectures and 
Correspondence. 

Joshua Giddings, Speeches and Letters. 

Henry Ward Beecher, Sermons, Lectures and 
Correspondence. 

Horace Greeley, New York Tribune. 



106 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

J. L. M. Curry, Speeches in United States Con- 
gress. 

John Quincy Adams, Speeches and Letters. 

Edward Everett, Speeches and Letters. 

Abraham Lincoln, Messages, Speeches and Dip- 
lomatic Correspondence. 

Lincoln — Douglas Debates. 

Life and Public Service of Salmon P. Chase, 
Schukers. 

Letters and State Papers of Abraham Lincoln, 
Nicolay and Hay. 

Abraham Lincoln, a History, Nicolay and Hay. 
Slavery and Abolition, Prof. Hart. 
History of the United States, Rhodes. 

Journal of the Virginia House of Delegates, 
Extra Session, 1861. 

Proceedings of the Peace Convention, 1861, 
Crittenden. 

Lee at Appomattox, Charles Francis Adams. 

Journal of the Virginia Convention, 1861. 

Life of James Buchanan, Curtis. 

Southern Historical Society Papers. 

The War Between the States, A. H. Stephens. 

The Great American Conllict, Greeley. 

Virginia's Attitude Towards Slavery and Seces- 
sion, Munford. 

Stonewall Jackson, Henderson. 

Facts and Falsehoods, Edmonds. 

Memorial Volume of Jefferson Davis, Jones. 



THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES 107 

Richmond, Dispatch. 

Annals of Congress. 

History of Slavery in Virginia, Ballagh. 

Defence of Virginia, Dabney. 

Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, 
Jefferson Davis. 

The Impending Crisis in the South, H. R. 
Helper. 

Life of Patrick Henry, Wirt. 

School History of the United States, Jones. 

Writings of W^ashington, John Marshall. 

Life of William H. Seward, Lothrop. 

The Confederate Cause and Conduct of the War, 
McGuire and Christian. 

Wendell Phillips, the Agitator, Martyn. 

Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Rich- 
ardson. 

Life and Times of James Madison, Rives. 

The Impending Crisis Dissected, Wolfe. 

The Real Lincoln, Chas. L. C. Miner. 

The Logic of History, Carpenter. 

Disunion and Reunion, Woodrow Wilson. 

Life of Wm. H. Seward, Frederick Bancroft. 

Life of Abraham Lincoln, W. H. Herndon, 1886 
(Suppressed). 

The True Story of A Great Life, Herndon & 
Weiks, 1880. 

Nullification and Secession, E. P. Powell. 



108 CAUSES THAT LED TO 

The Lemars (Iowa) Sentinel. 
Recollections of Lincoln, Ward Hill Lamon. 
Life of Abraham Lincoln, Holland. 
Sherman's Memoirs, W. T. Sherman. 
Ohio in The War, Whitelaw Reid. 
Black's Essays, Jeremiah S. Black. 
Life of Abraham Lincoln, Ida Tarbell. 
Beacon Lights of History, Lord. 

Abraham Lincoln, Noah Brooks in Heroes of 
the Nation. 

History of Slavery, Blake. 

Democracy in the South Before the War, Dyer. 

History of the People of the United States, 
McMasters. 

Defense of The South, Richardson. 




INDEX. 



A Pagre 

Abolition Society 37 

Abolitionism 80 

Abolitionism, its origin 34 

Abolitionists change front 93 

Abolitionism spreads 37 

Abolitionism, methods of 39 

Abolition paper 37 

Abolitionist's Propaganda 50 

Act of 1795 invoited 97 

Adams' Administration 18. 19 

Adams, Chas. Francis quoted 76,77 

Adams, John 17 

Adams, Candidate of Federalists 17 

Adams, Minister to England 17 

Adams, John Qulncy 27 

Adams, John Quincy quoted 59 

Alien and Sedition Laws 18, 21 

Ames, Fisher 28 

Anderson, Major 92 

B 

Bancroft quoted 33 

Banks. Gov. quoted 4 7 

Beauregai'd, General 92 

Beecher, Henry Ward 4 5 

Blaclt Republican Party 45, 47, 49 

Bleeding Kansas 52 

Bloodletting prescribed 74 

Books unfair 10 

Boston Gazette threatens Madison 28 

Boston petitions Adams 19 

Brown, John 45, 100 

Brown, John, Capture, trial and execution 51 

Brown, John, Raid 51 

Buchanan, President 80, 97 

Buchanan, President, quoted 86 

Burgesses of Virginia 33 

Byrd, Col. William, quoted 11 

C 

Calhoun, John C 40 

Cameron, Senator, quoted 48 

Campbell. Judge, quoted 90 

Cary, Matthew, quoted 21,22 

Causes traced 11 

Cavaliers 12 

Chase, Bishop 30 

Chase, Salmon P., quoted 59 

Chicag-o Platform 57 

Commissioners from New England 32 

Commissioners from Virginia 70 

Committee from Virginia ."] ...'. gg 

Committee on Federal Relations 85 

Confederate Commissioners 89 

Confederate Government seeks peace 88 

Conspiracy with British Government 26 

Convention of 1854 45 

Constitutional Convention '. 15 

Constitution burned by Garrison 39 

Constitution denounced 40 

Cotton States 60, 69 

Curry, J. L. M ' gg 



Danifl, John W., quoted '. 32 

DauKhttrs of the Confederacy 9 

Davis, .It'ffer.sf)n 64 

l)avis. .Iffferson quoted 41,64 

l)fC'hiratlon of Independence denounced 28 

iJechiratlon of Independence Invoked 57 

Declaration of Independence referred to 60 

Demo.iatic Tarty 13, 17, 25, 33. 43 

l>i.suniori, oriffin of 41 

l>i.sunion i>arty 33 

Divine UiKht 19 

Doufflas, .Stephen A., quoted 80 

Dwlght. Hev. Dr., quoted 28 

E 

Efforts to save Union 73 

Kllis. Governor N. C, fiuoted 95 

Kllyson, Governor J. Taylor 102 

Knierson, Italph Waldo, (juoted 53 

T 

Kederal Constitution 22 

federalist partv 16, 17, 19 

Federalists in War of 1812 27 

Klaf? fired on 93 

KhiB insulted 82 

I-'ort Sumter 81, 90. 92 100 

Fi-emont, John C, nominated 45 

O 

Garison, AVilliam Dloyd 39 

Genius of Universal Emancipation 37 

Grant, General 17 

Greely, Horace 52, 60 

H 

Hall of Fame 52 

llaiiiihon, Alex 13, 16 

llaiiiihun. a Monarchist 14 

llaiiiiltonian Partv 15 

Hart. I'rof., of Harvard 67 

llattfiird Courant 29 

llaitlKrd Convention 29, 30, 31,32 

Helper l{ool< 49 

Hinil.rson, historian, quoted 96 

Henry, Hritish conspirator 32 

Hill. A. r 66 

Histories, partisan 9 

Hopkins, Erastus, quoted 51 

J 

Jackson, Governor, Mississippi 96 

Janriey, John 78 

.lefferson. Thomas 13, 19. 25, 33 

Jerfcrsfn), Thomas, denounced 20 

JetTersonian party \ 20 

.li'fferson's platform 20 

Jefferson quoted 21. 31, 59, 66 

X 

Kansas 45 

Keillcy, I Inn. A. M l6l-'» 

K.-y West ■.■.■... S5 

KinjT of i;nKland i»etitit)ned 34 

!• 

DanptlMn. .Iiihii, (nmted 21 

Ijoe, l-'ltzliuKh 66 

Lee, UolM-rt K '.".'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.".'.ei, "l04 

Lee, Robert E., quoted 65 78 



Page 

Letcher, Governor of Virginia 69 

Lincoln's Administration 87 

Lincoln's advisers 86-7 

Lincoln's Cabinet 91 

Lincoln elected 57 

Lincoln's inaugural address 86 

Lincoln inaugurated 83 

Lincoln's Message 83 

Lincoln nominated 49, 53 

Lincoln quoted 60, 98 

Louisiana admitted 58 

Lyon, Matthew, imprisoned 18 

JUL 

Madison 19. 26, 28, 25. 33 

Martin, Luther, quoted 14 

Mason 25 

Massachusets Resolutions 29 

Maury, Commodore 66 

IMissouri Compromise 37 

Monarchial Government 13, 17, 20 

Monroe 25 

Munford, B. D 6, 96 

McGoffin, Governor of Kentucky 96 

McGuire, Dr. Hunter 67 

XT 

Negro Equality 38 

New England, hotbed of secession 33 

New England's insincerity 35 

New England and Kansas 46 

New England, perpetuates slave trade 34 

New England, seeks to overthrow Union 26. 27 

New England settled 11 

New Engl&nd .States Convention .' 30 

New lOngland threatens to secede 32 

New York Tribune 60, 82 

Northern Historian quoted 63 

Northern Confederacy 22, 26 

Northern Leaders, reference to 53 

Northern propaganda 51 

O 

Olive Branch, The 21 

Overt Act 54 

Partnership property 62 

Patriotism invoked 84 

Peace Conference 71 

Peace Conference, Failure of '74 

Pelhani Papers 22. 29 

Phillip.s, Wendell 40 

F'hillips. Wendell, denounces Lincoln 81 

Political war on South 23 

Preston, William B 88 

Public property 61 

Puritans 12 

Q 

Quincy, Josiah 29, 58 

R 

Randolph, Geo. W 88 

Rawls, Judge William, quoted 59 

Rebel 63 

Reconstruction 10, 45 

Relief Squadron 91 



Faffe 

Republic denounced 28 

Republican Tarty ' 16. <7 

Rhodes, historian, quoted 68. 71 

8 

Seceding States seek adjustment 62 

Secession Convention 83 

Secession, right of unquestioned 29 

Seward. W. H 58. 84 

Seward, duplicity of 81 

Seward described 43 

Seward plays false 88 

Seward, policy of 84 

Seward (juoted 76 

Slavery abandoned 84 

Slavery made issue 33 

Slaveholders denounced 37 

Slaves, care of 39 

Slavf trade In Constitutional Convention 35 

South Carolina Seceded 64 

Southern Leaders 37 

Southern Statesmen for Union 46 

South fouRht for principle 99 

South loved L'nion 64 

Soutli misrepresented 38 

South opposed slavery 33 

Spotswood. Alexander, quoted 12 

States withdraw 61 

Stuart. .1. K. H 66 

Stonewall Jackson 66 

Strong, Caleb, (Joveinor of Massachusetts 27-S 

Stuart, A. H. H 88 

Summers, Geo. W., quoted 72 

Sumter, General, assaulted 18 

T 

Traitor 63 

Tyler, John 71 

n 

Uncle Toms Cabin 39 

Union denounced 28, 39 

Union distasteful to North 54 

V 

Virginia abused 28 

Virginia Convention 86 

Virginia Klectlon 77 

Viiglnia General Assembly 75 

Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions 19 

\'irginia luvi- of Uni<m 68 

Virginia refuses Lincoln's Call 28 

Virginia IJesolutions 70 

\'irgjnia secedes 95 

Virginia settled 12 

Virginia settlers described 13 

Virginia State Convention 76 

W 

War of 1K12 27 

Washington 33 

W.ishitigton. irillut'nce of 16 

Washington writes Hamilton 15 

WiuK Party 43 

Whiskey Rebellion 97 

Withdrawal from Union threatened 11 



